The AI boom is charging up the battery business.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at an R&D lab in the heart of San Francisco's design district,

full of circuit boards, humming fridge-like devices.

And I drove an EV for quite a long time.

I don't think I ever pictured what the actual battery pack looked like

inside my vehicle. Yeah, they're not that beautiful objects. They're just kind of a little black

skateboard. It's not a high design object now. With a bunch of red and black wires coming out of it.

But this is really the core of an electric vehicle. That's Colin Campbell, chief technology officer

at Redwood Materials, an electric vehicle

battery recycling startup that recently expanded into providing grid energy storage for data centers.

It's part of the expansion of AI infrastructure we've been exploring this week, and as we've

talked about, AI companies and their massive data centers

are trying to tap as much power as possible

while they face pushback from communities worried about downstream effects,

like higher electricity bills.

The thing that really distinguishes the AI companies

that they really want to move fast. And building battery

storage coupled with renewables is often much faster than interconnecting to the grid or building

natural gas turbines. So we can be the first movers. And last year, Redwood successfully activated

a large-scale EV battery grid in Nevada, specifically

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