Charging on EVgo just got easier for Teslas
EVgo has added Autocharge+ capability to Teslas using the Tesla CCS Adapter in its latest app update. This allows CCS-enabled Teslas to charge at EVgo stations without having to swipe a card. Strangely, it only works when using the Tesla CCS adapter and not when using a normal Tesla connector available at some EVgo stations. We’ll explain below.
EVgo has been rolling out its Autocharge+ to more vehicles since September, with many brands now able to use its version of “Plug and Charge.” That’s the marketing name for the maturing ISO 15118 standard which allows drivers to charge their cars as simply as plugging in and walking off.
EVgo says it will eventually support Plug and Charge once the standard has matured and issues are worked out. Its rival, Electrify America, has Ford vehicles as well as Porsche and now VW.ID4s on Plug and Charge. Volkswagen and Porsche are conspicuously missing from the EVgo Autocharge+ list:
The following models are eligible: Cadillac LYRIQ, Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV, Ford Mach-E and F-150 Lightning, Genesis GV60, GMC Hummer EV, Hyundai Ioniq, Ioniq 5 and Kona, Kia Niro and EV6, Mercedes EQS, Polestar 2, Subaru Solterra, Toyota bZ4x, and Volvo XC40 Recharge. Update: The new Tesla CCS1 Adapter will soon be eligible for use on the EVgo network and Tesla Model X, Y, S, S Plaid and 3 will be eligible for Autocharge+
Charging simplicity
Simplicity is one of the reasons Tesla’s Supercharger network gets higher satisfaction numbers. All Superchargers work the same way. There is no need to swipe a credit card or pull up an app and wait for communication, the car just starts charging when you plug it in.
In order to make this work, there needs to be communication between the car and the charger. The charger needs to be able to request identification from the car so that the session can be charged to the right account.
EVgo does have some stations with Tesla charge connectors, but those are not capable of Autocharge+ because EVgo doesn’t have access to the same communication protocols that Tesla uses. The Tesla plugs are basically integrated Tesla Chademo adapters and AutoCharge doesn’t work over Chademo. That will present a messaging problem for EVgo, but I imagine the EVgo engineers are busy trying to integrate Tesla’s CCS adapters the same way they did with Chademo.
However, even though Tesla’s CCS adapter only came out last month, EVgo has already added it to the list of cars that are capable of Autocharge+. In the company’s newest app update, it mentions that the Tesla CCS adapter is now compatible with Autocharge+:
EVgo’s Autocharge+ website now confirms that all stations will allow Tesla owners with the CCS compatible chargers to charge at EVgo. In 2020, Tesla made all of its cars CCS compatible and offered upgrades for older vehicles.
EVgo stations are often in places where Tesla chargers aren’t or in some cases might be a cheaper option.
In order to use these stations, you need to set up a one-time enrollment in the EVgo app by linking your VIN to your EVgo account, but after finishing the process you should just be able to plug and go without any trouble. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. More competition is better, right?
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China set a new record for clean tech exports in August 2025, hitting $20 billion, according to new data analyzed using Ember’s China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer. The country remains the world’s largest exporter of electrotech, with surging demand for EVs and batteries leading the charge.
EV exports jumped 26% from January through August compared to the same period in 2024, while battery exports rose 23%. Other sectors saw more modest growth – grid technology up 22%, wind up 16%, and heating and cooling systems up 4% – but those gains were offset by a 19% drop in solar PV export value. EVs and batteries are now worth more than double the value of China’s solar PV exports.
This milestone is remarkable because it comes even as technology prices have fallen sharply. Solar panel prices, for example, have plunged more than 80% over the past decade, making them more affordable and driving up global demand. In August alone, China exported 46 gigawatts (GW) of solar PV – more than Australia’s entire installed solar capacity – setting a record in capacity terms. However, their dollar value remains 47% below their March 2023 peak.
Falling prices have fueled growth in new regions. Over half of the increase in China’s EV exports this year came from outside the OECD, with the ASEAN region emerging as a major growth engine. EV exports to ASEAN surged 75% in the first eight months of 2025, mainly driven by Indonesia. The country saw the biggest rise in Chinese EV imports globally this year, becoming the world’s ninth-largest EV market. Battery electric vehicles made up 14% of new car sales in Indonesia in August 2025, up from 9% a year earlier.
Africa is also rapidly adopting Chinese clean tech. From January to August, EV exports to the continent nearly tripled year-over-year (+287%), albeit from a very low base, with Morocco leading growth and Nigeria’s imports soaring sixfold. Latin America and the Caribbean saw an 11% rise, while the Middle East climbed 72%.
Domestically, China’s own adoption of clean tech is accelerating even faster. EVs accounted for 52% of new car sales in August, and in the first half of 2025, China installed more than twice as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined. Ember’s recent China Energy Transition Review attributes this momentum to consistent policy support that’s reshaping the country’s economy and energy system around electrified technologies.
“Demand for clean technologies continues to skyrocket as more and more countries seek their benefits, from low-cost power to cheaper vehicles,” said Ember analyst Euan Graham. “China’s electrotech is becoming the basis of the new energy system, with continued cost reductions driving faster growth than ever, especially in emerging economies.”
Read more: The era of cheap Chinese solar + storage is ending – here’s why
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Environment
This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers
Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.
Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.
“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”
His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.
Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.
Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”
The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.
“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.
Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.
With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.
The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.
“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.
A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.
‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’
Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.
In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.
“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”
Competition is fierce.
Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.
OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.
And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.
While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.
However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.
“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.
Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.
“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”
The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.
“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.
He understands why many people are skeptical.
“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”
WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits
There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.
GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.
As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.
Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.
| EV MODEL | Q3 25/Q3 24 | Q3 25 | Q3 24 | YTD 25/YTD 24 | YTD 25 | YTD 24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Equinox EV | +156.70% | 25,085 | 9,772 | +389.88% | 52,834 | 10,785 |
| Chevrolet Blazer EV | +1.14% | 8,089 | 7,998 | +36.72% | 20,825 | 15,232 |
| Chevrolet Silverado EV | +97.49% | 3,940 | 1,995 | +78.58% | 9,379 | 5,252 |
| Chevrolet BrightDrop | * | 2,384 | * | * | 3,976 | 0 |
| GMC Hummer EV Pickup | +21.86% | 5,246 | 4,305 | +48.65% | 13,233 | 8,902 |
| GMC Sierra EV | +771.84% | 3,374 | 387 | +1,488.37% | 6,147 | 387 |
| Cadillac Optiq | * | 4,886 | * | * | 9,826 | 0 |
| Cadillac Lyriq | +1.18% | 7,309 | 7,224 | -18.17% | 16,626 | 20,318 |
| Cadillac Vistiq | * | 3,924 | * | * | 5,669 | 0 |
| Cadillac Escalade IQ | * | 2,264 | * | * | 6,030 | 0 |
| Total | +109.91% | 66,501 | 31,681 | +137.44% | 144,545 | 60,876 |
Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.
That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).
It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.
You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.
Cadillac Escalade IQ review
SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.
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