Battery recycling and cathode manufacturing firm Redwood Supplies has raised $350 million because it grows its new power storage enterprise in a bid to energy the AI information heart increase.

The Sequence E spherical, led by enterprise agency Eclipse, additionally included a brand new strategic funding by Nvidia’s enterprise capital arm, NVentures. The corporate’s valuation was not disclosed, however a supply accustomed to the spherical instructed TechCrunch it was about $6 billion, a billion greater than its earlier valuation.

The funds might be used to develop the corporate’s burgeoning power storage enterprise in addition to its refining and supplies manufacturing capability. Redwood, based by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, additionally plans to rent extra engineers and workers for its operations workforce.

When Redwood Supplies was based in 2017, it got down to create a round provide chain for batteries by specializing in recycling scrap from battery cell manufacturing and shopper electronics like cellphone batteries and laptop computer computer systems. That enterprise — which continues to develop — entails processing these discarded items and extracting supplies like cobalt, nickel and lithium which might be sometimes mined. Redwood provides these supplies again to its prospects, which embrace Panasonic, GM and Toyota.

Redwood has since added new, associated pursuits like cathode manufacturing. Most lately, it launched an power storage enterprise that makes use of the hundreds of EV batteries it collects to offer energy to firms. That enterprise, referred to as Redwood Vitality, is essentially directed in the direction of serving AI information facilities in addition to different large-scale industrial websites.

Redwood is sitting on large portions of EV batteries which have an excessive amount of life left to place by way of the recycling course of. The corporate ties these retired EV batteries to renewable power sources like wind and photo voltaic to create an off-grid system that sends energy to AI information facilities or industrial websites. The system might be tied to the grid, and Redwood says the EV batteries will also be related to pure gasoline generators or future nuclear mills for large-scale power storage.

It has loads of provide. The corporate recovers greater than 70% of all used or discarded battery packs in North America, and never all are recycled immediately. As of June, Redwood had stockpiled greater than 1 gigawatt-hour value of batteries that may very well be used for power storage. By 2028, the corporate plans to deploy 20 gigawatt-hours of grid-scale storage, putting it on monitor to change into the most important repurposer of used EV battery packs.