Ford (F) races past Q3 2022 revenue expectations on EV boost, absorbing Argo engineers to boost self-driving tech
Ford (F) released its third-quarter 2022 earnings report after the stock market close today. The automaker has been battling supply chain bottlenecks all year, warning investors of a hit to its bottom line last month.
According to the automaker’s release, Ford beat Q3 2022 revenue as its electric vehicles continue gaining momentum. In addition, the company says it will be transferring its self-driving tech interests internally after a significant loss on its Argo AI investment.
Ford Q3 2022 earnings preview
Earlier today, we released a preview of Ford’s third-quarter earnings, including what you can expect from Wall St analysts.
Ford forecasted Q3 operating profit between $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion, despite Wall St expectations of around $1.8 billion.
According to estimates, Ford is expected to post rising revenue from last year, between $36 billion and $37 billion. As mentioned in the earlier post, a few things to look out for are comments on Ford’s Rivian stake (almost 10%), full-year guidance, and electric vehicle targets.
Up until now, ford has stuck with its guidance for 2022 despite an expected $1 billion hit in additional supply chain costs.
Ford Q3 2022 financial results and analysis
Just after the market close, Ford reported it had exceeded Wall St revenue expectations despite lingering supply chain issues.
Ford’s revenue came in at $39.4 billion, up 10% from last year. Operating profit of $1.8 million was in line with Wall St. forecasts and above Ford’s recent guidance.
Meanwhile, Ford achieved strong operating cash flow of $3.8 billion in Q3. Adjusted free cash flow of $3.6 billion is pushing the automaker’s FY guidance to between $9.5 billion to $10 billion.
The automaker believes the third quarter set the company up for a solid finish to the year and anticipates 2022 operating profit of around $11.5 billion, up about 15% from previous forecasts.
To reach this, Ford says, it will take about 10% YOY growth in wholesale shipments.
Despite this, Ford posted a net loss of $827 million due to a $2.7 billion loss on its Argo AI investment (more on this below).
Ford’s Q3 2022 earnings results were influenced by two things, according to the automaker:
- Supply shortages resulting in around 40,000 vehicles sitting in inventory awaiting parts
- A higher-than-expected supplier payment of around $1 billion
The company ended the quarter with $32 billion in cash and $49 billion in liquidity.
Ford’s Q3 electric vehicle progress
Ford says it’s on the “cusp” of an evolution in electric vehicles and that orders continue to grow substantially with unprecedented demand for EVs.
- Ford remained the #2 EV brand in the United States through Q3 2022, behind only Tesla. The automaker says it’s still on track to meet its 600,000 EV run rate by the end of 2023 and 2 million by 2026.
- In Q3, Ford also set new US dealership requirements for dealers to boost electric vehicle deployment.
- Ford broke ground at its BlueOval City in Tennessee, a focal point in Ford’s EV plans which is slated to open in 2025.
- The company will add shifts to boost the Mustang Mach-E production capacity while continuing to scale E-Transit production.
- In Europe, where Ford has led the commercial segment for seven years, Ford revealed the E-Transit custom.
- To meet these targets, Ford continues securing raw materials and battery capacity.
- Ford’s investments in Rivian remained under $1 billion in the third quarter.
Ford expects climate initiatives in the United States to boost demand while offsetting its investments to accelerate EV production capabilities. The automaker says it believes it will meet the requirements for certain Mach-E and F-150 lighting models to receive the federal EV tax credit.
Ford shifts self-driving tech plans internally
During Q3, Ford decided to shift its spending on L4 advanced driver assistance systems being developed by Argo AI to focus on the internal development of L2/L3 technology.
As Argo has failed to attract investors, Ford has posted a substantial loss ($2.7 billion pretax) on its investment in the company. When Ford first invested in Argo, it planned to introduce L4 technology by 2021. However, as Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, states:
But things have changed, and there’s a huge opportunity right now for Ford to give time – the
most valuable commodity in modern life – back to millions of customers while they’re in their
vehicles.
Before adding:
It’s mission-critical for Ford to develop great and differentiated L2+ and L3 applications that at the same time make transportation even safer.
Ford’s chief also mentioned they would hire talented engineers from Argo as the company dissolves to accelerate internal development. The company says the decision comes as it sees rising interest and margins in other segments, such as Ford Pro and electric vehicles. Although the company is not capital constrained, it will use the investments to drive strategic growth in these areas.
Other observations from Ford’s third-quarter results
- Ford’s auto market share grew in North America to 12.8% (+1.7% YOY) and in Europe to 6.6% (up 0.4% YOY).
- In China, Ford’s market share dropped 0.5% YOY to 2%. The company also noted a quarterly loss due to investments in electric vehicles in the region.
- Ford Pro, the automaker’s portfolio of business services and products, continues gaining momentum, with the company’s electric commercial van, the E-Transit holding a solid lead in full-size commercial trucks and vans in the United States (90%) and Europe.
- Starting next year, Ford will report in three business segments, including Ford Model e (for electric vehicles), Ford Pro (its business products and services), and Ford Blue (ICE vehicles) as the company gets ready to accelerate EV sales.
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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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