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Tesla has revamped its referral program in North America, shifting to a system allowing current Tesla owners to use their Tesla referral code to earn “loyalty points” that can be spent on various Tesla products.

The newest iteration referral program gives “credits” to both the buyer and referrer of a product, with a scaling amount of credits depending on the product purchased. The credits are only given to both buyer and referrer if the buyer is not a current Tesla customer – if they are a current customer, then they will earn their own “loyalty credits” but won’t be able to use a referral code.

Tesla’s referral program page lays out the specifics, with further information available in the Tesla app’s “loot box” section.

So far, the only products that qualify for credits are Tesla solar panels and the Tesla solar roof, both of which give 6,000 credits each.

The page does say “earn credits upon delivery of your car or activation of your solar system,” which suggests that cars may be added to the page at some point. We’re not sure how many credits they will generate if they do get added to the program. While Tesla’s referral program was ended last year for cars, cash rewards for solar referrals continued and were active up until yesterday, when Tesla revamped the program to give out credits instead of cash.

tesla referral code

Those credits can then be spent on other Tesla products, though they expire after 12 months if not spent. The products are a selection from those on Tesla’s online shop, including both useful accessories for Tesla owners and some of the more “meme” products like Tesla’s short shorts or bizarre sipping glasses.

Here’s a complete list of products available:

The prices don’t seem to map proportionally to the prices of the real-life items (for example, the Wall Connector is $400, and J1772 Wall Connector is $550), but it looks like the value of a single solar roof referral is about the same as it was in the previous version of the program – in the range of a few hundred dollars.

We’ve expected something to happen with the referral program for a little while now, reporting last year that Tesla was considering changes to the program and then finding out last month that Tesla had updated the mobile app with new referral program info.

Last month, Tesla launched a new “points rewards” program in China, which turns out to be very similar to these new changes to the referral program. China also gets quarterly and annual raffles, which seem to be missing from the North American program. And Europe does not seem to have a similar referral program update as of this moment.

Tesla originally spawned the referral program after requests from Tesla fans who wanted to be rewarded for the number of friends they had converted to driving electric. In the early days of Tesla and EVs, word of mouth from EV fans was very effective at selling cars, particularly given the number of questions that prospective buyers might have about a new technology.

The referral program started off with $1,000 in “Tesla credits” for each use of an owner’s Tesla referral code. Those credits could be used on service and Tesla products, and then later Tesla started to offer various prizes like wall connectors, wheel sets, Tesla-branded luggage, and even sending your photos into space. It was modified many times, but eventually got a little out of control and Tesla killed off the program after they ended up promising over 80 next-gen Roadsters to top referrers.

The program was then scaled back to offer 1,000 free Supercharger miles to buyers and referrers, and most recently only consisted of a cash reward for solar roof referrals.

As of now, it looks like Tesla has mostly just modified the existing program of cash rewards for solar installations, but it’s clear that they have more planned given the “car” verbiage on their referral pages.

Electrek’s Take

This is interesting timing, considering Tesla has recently drastically scaled back its solar operation. We’ve received several reports of projects being cancelled and Tesla claiming they are shutting down operations, even in some popular markets, just in the last few weeks. So it seems like an odd time to revamp a system for solar referrals.

But this isn’t just about solar, is it? It seems clear that the program is intended to include cars at some point; they’re just not on there yet.

The introduction of the referral program in China coincided with a price drop in the region, suggesting that Tesla was looking to shore up demand after a few years of continual price hikes across the lineup and around the globe.

While we haven’t seen a price drop in the US (and don’t necessarily expect one), this could still be a way that Tesla is prepping to shore up demand on certain products, by adding them to the referral program when or if they see a need.

As for how we feel about it – this does seem a little more robust than the previous programs. Instead of a maze of ever-changing prize tiers, some of which were worth large amounts and took forever to deliver and some of which never materialized, we now have a clearer list of readily available products that have some monetary value but not enough to make referrers feel like total shills when recommending Tesla vehicles.

One of the issues with the original program, in my mind, was that it turned previously innocent EV evangelism into a method for personal profit, thus making it seem that word-of-mouth advocacy was being done for monetary gain, rather than honest recommendations from EV fans. It threatened to make EV fans seem like commissioned car salesman rather than genuine and honest advocates.

Now, there’s still a sense of monetary gain here, but it’s more like a perk – a few T-shirts, some supercharger miles, or a spare charging connector for each use of a referral code. It’s not as overwhelming as the idea that someone could earn a several thousand dollar Powerwall system or potentially even a supercar after hawking a Tesla to their friends.

So it seems like an improvement, but we’ll have to wait to see how it all shakes out, and whether Tesla adds other products to the program.

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Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

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Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Google, Anthropic agree to cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership Thursday, a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.

The deal, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, is the company’s largest TPU commitment yet and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity online in 2026.

Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips.

While competitors tout even loftier projections — OpenAI’s 33-gigawatt “Stargate” chief among them — Anthropic’s move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle.

Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

A key to Anthropic’s infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture.

The company’s Claude family of language models runs across Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research.

Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic “strong price-performance and efficiency.”

“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao in a release.

Anthropic’s ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints.

According to a person familiar with the company’s infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.

Google, for its part, is leaning into the partnership.

“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand its usage of TPUs reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency its teams have seen with TPUs for several years,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a release, touting the company’s seventh-generation “Ironwood” accelerator as part of a maturing portfolio.

Anthropic takes a page from Palantir as AI battle with OpenAI goes global

Claude’s breakneck revenue growth

Anthropic’s escalating compute demand reflects its explosive business growth.

The company’s annual revenue run rate is now approaching $7 billion, and Claude powers more than 300,000 businesses — a staggering 300× increase over the past two years. The number of large customers, each contributing more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding assistant, generated $500 million in annualized revenue within just two months of launch, which Anthropic claims makes it the “fastest-growing product” in history.

While Google is powering Anthropic’s next phase of compute expansion, Amazon remains its most deeply embedded partner.

The retail and cloud giant has invested $8 billion in Anthropic to date, more than double Google’s confirmed $3 billion in equity.

Still, AWS is considered Anthropic’s chief cloud provider, making its influence structural and not just financial.

Its custom-built supercomputer for Claude, known as Project Rainier, runs on Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips. That shift matters not just for speed, but for cost: Trainium avoids the premium margins of other chips, enabling more compute per dollar spent.

AWS outage ripples across internet, puts pressure on Amazon ahead of earnings

Wall Street is already seeing results.

Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Alex Haissl estimated that Anthropic added one to two percentage points to AWS’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter and this year’s first, with its contribution expected to exceed five points in the second half of 2025.

Wedbush’s Scott Devitt previously told CNBC that once Claude becomes a default tool for enterprise developers, that usage flows directly into AWS revenue — a dynamic he believes will drive AWS growth for “many, many years.”

Google, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role. In January, the company agreed to a new $1 billion investment in Anthropic, adding to its previous $2 billion and 10% equity stake.

Critically, Anthropic’s multicloud approach proved resilient during Monday’s AWS outage, which did not impact Claude thanks to its diversified architecture.

Still, Anthropic isn’t playing favorites. The company maintains control over model weights, pricing, and customer data — and has no exclusivity with any cloud provider. That neutral stance could prove key as competition among hyperscalers intensifies.

WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

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JB Straubel’s Redwood snags $350M to deploy more US-made battery storage

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JB Straubel’s Redwood snags 0M to deploy more US-made battery storage

Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO and cofounder JB Straubel, has raised $350 million in new funding to scale its US-made battery storage systems and critical materials operations. The company is ramping up to meet surging demand from AI data centers and the clean energy sector.

The oversubscribed Series E round was led by Eclipse, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and other new strategic investors.

As global supplies tighten, the US is racing to secure domestic production of critical materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper. In July, Redwood and GM signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to turn new and second-life GM batteries into energy storage systems. Redwood launched a new venture in June called Redwood Energy that repurposes both new and used EV battery packs into fast and cost-effective energy storage systems.

Redwood says large-scale battery storage is the fastest and most scalable way to enable new AI data center rollout while unlocking stranded generation capacity and stabilizing the grid. Battery storage also helps industrial facilities electrify and balance renewable energy output. The company aims to deliver a new generation of affordable, US-built energy storage systems designed to serve the grid, heavy industry, and AI data centers, reducing dependence on imported Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.

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Redwood will use the new capital to expand energy storage deployments, refining and materials production capacity, and its engineering and operations teams.

Read more: Redwood is repurposing GM’s EV batteries into energy storage


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Rivian to lay off about 4% of staff to possibly lean down ahead of 2026 R2 launch [Update]

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Rivian to lay off about 4% of staff to possibly lean down ahead of 2026 R2 launch [Update]

A report this morning detailed American EV automaker Rivian’s plans to lay off a portion of its current workforce as it tries to conserve cash while gearing up for the launch of its newest model, the R2, next year.

Update 10/23/25: As promised, Rivian followed up with more details of this morning’s report regarding layoffs. The following letter from Rivian founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, was sent out to the automaker’s workforce moments ago:

Hi Team, 

I am writing to share a difficult update. 

With the launch of R2 in front of us and the need to profitably scale our business, we have made the very difficult decision to make a number of structural adjustments to our teams. These changes result in a reduction in the size of our team by roughly 4.5%. 

These are not changes that were made lightly. With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling our go-to-market functions. This news is challenging to hear, and the hard work and contributions of the team members who are leaving are greatly appreciated.  

To ensure we move forward with clarity, I want to summarize the areas most impacted. 

  • Streamlining the Customer Journey: To provide a seamless experience for our customers, we are integrating the Vehicle Operations workstreams into the Service organization to create fewer customer handoffs and clearer ownership. We are also integrating the Delivery and Mobile Operations into the Sales organization to ensure the purchase experience is as seamless as possible with a single touchpoint throughout the entire sales process and to delivery. 
  • Elevating Our Marketing Efforts: Historically we have had multiple functions that collectively capture what would typically be housed in a single marketing organization. We have made the decision to form a single marketing organization, and while we recruit our first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), I will be acting as Interim CMO. Our Marketing Experiences team, led by Denise Cherry, and the Creative Studio team, led by Matt Soldan, will both report directly to me for now. 

These changes are being made to ensure we can deliver on our potential by scaling efficiently towards building a healthy and profitable business. I am incredibly confident in R2 and the hard work of our teams to deliver and ramp this incredible product. 

Thanks again everyone. 

RJ


Not much backstory here, so we’ll get right into it.

A report from the Wall Street Journal this morning shared brief details of Rivian’s layoff plans, which could affect approximately 4% of the current staff. At the end of 2024, Rivian’s workforce tally sat around 15,000 people, so the reported layoff could affect as many as 600 individuals, possibly more.

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Other outlets have pointed out that EV automakers like Rivian have faced a tougher market following the end of the $7,500 federal tax incentive. While that may be true to a certain extent, most of Rivian’s R1 variants didn’t qualify, unless it was a lease, and the automaker has deployed its own incentive programs.

In fact, Rivian’s Q3 2025 deliveries exceeded expectations. It remains speculative at this point until we receive an official statement from Rivian explaining the plans to lay off staff, but this could be a preemptive decision based on market forecasts.

Furthermore, Rivian is closer than ever to launching R2 in 2026, which has the makings of becoming a bestseller in the EV industry if sales match a mere portion of the hype surrounding it. The layoffs could also be a lean-down to conserve funds through the home stretch of that development process before beefing back up again in 2026 or 2027 when demand is (ideally) higher.

We really do not and will not know the reasoning behind the decision until Rivian shares more information.

We reached out to Rivian for comment and were told the automaker will have more to share this afternoon. We will update this story as new information becomes available.

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