Here’s how EV batteries can be given a second life

Published

2 years ago

March 29, 2023

admin

Over 300 million electric vehicles are expected to be on the world’s roads by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. However, the American EV market is small. In 2021, the U.S. accounted for less than 10% of new global EV registrations, while China and Europe accounted for 50% and 35%, respectively. China also accounts for over 70% of global EV battery production capacity, meaning the U.S. is heavily dependent on imports of batteries and battery minerals.

“It has been clear since 2014 that China had a plan to lock up the bulk of the world’s production of battery minerals,” said John Voelcker, an EV analyst. “The world’s largest battery company is now in China.”

By 2050, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory expects the demand for graphite, lithium and cobalt, all critical minerals in EV batteries, to increase by 500%. It estimates that the lifetime of an EV battery is around 12 to 15 years in moderate climates.

“The degradation of an EV battery pack is one of the biggest questions of the industry,” said Lea Malloy, head of electric vehicle battery solutions at Cox Automotive Mobility. “Every battery will reach the end of life. It’s important that these end-of-life packs are recycled, so they don’t end up where they don’t belong.”

With the estimated reuse lifetime of an EV battery ranging anywhere between five to 30 years, extending the life cycle could reduce the need for mining critical minerals. Companies like American Battery Technology have already developed processes to recycle lithium-ion batteries, but Oklahoma-based Spiers New Technologies or SNT is pioneering a different process.

“It’s fantastic that you can drive an electric vehicle, knowing that the end-of-the life of that battery pack, the ingredients will be reused in a new battery pack and a new electric car, and that we really want to play a role in,” said Dirk Spiers, founder and CEO of SNT.

SNT was founded in 2014 with just two employees. In 2021, it was acquired by Cox Automotive, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based media conglomerate Cox Enterprises. The company now has over 400 employees and offers what it calls a “one-stop solution” for used and faulty EV batteries.

“We are like a diner of battery services,” said Spiers. “You can come to us for a cup of coffee, but if you want to have a steak, a cup of soup or apple pie, we serve all these things.”

The company receives EV batteries directly from the dealership or original equipment manufacturer. It then puts the battery packs through its diagnosis system, named Alfred. Alfred assesses the health of the battery pack to determine whether it can eventually go back into a vehicle. A pack can be repaired to operational conditions, remanufactured to original factory standards, refurbished and upgraded to current factory standards. If truly at its end-of-life, SNT will recycle it.

“A couple of years ago there was a cost associated with recycling a lithium-ion battery pack. Now it is a positive,” he said. “If you give me a lithium-ion battery pack, I probably will give you money back for it. And that’s the beauty of it. The intrinsic value of that battery pack is higher than the cost of recycling.”

In addition to its Oklahoma City-based headquarters, SNT also has facilities in Las Vegas, Detroit and the Netherlands with plans to expand to the east coast and the U.K. Right now it says being centrally located in the U.S. is key to its business model.

“We need to be where our customers are, being bang in the middle of the country helps. We can reach either cost between two and three days,” Spiers said.

The company wouldn’t disclose the number of battery packs it’s capable of storing but said it handles on average 15 thousand battery packs and modules per month.

“We get anything from, say, 50 to 100 battery packs per day. Probably 80, 90% can be refurbished. Recycling is maybe 5 to 10%. And the rest is repurposing, second life. But those numbers will fluctuate,” he said.

Since its inception, SNT says it’s serviced more than 240 thousand packs and more than 50 thousand have been repaired, refurbished or remanufactured.

“If you look at the EV market and take Tesla out, we probably have 60, 65, 70% of that market,” said Spiers. “GM, Ford, Stellantis, Porsche, Volkswagen, Nissan, Toyota, Volvo we keep adding to the list.”

But, why doesn’t it work with Tesla, the most recognizable American EV company?

“They like to do their own stuff. You know, they’re a little bit like Apple,” he said.

“When I think about the future of EV battery recycling specifically, I see it as an increasingly competitive space,” Malloy said. “At the same time, there is a bit of a mismatch of maybe more supply and capacity around EV battery recycling than demand. We’re just riding this first wave of electric vehicles who could be on the road for ten-plus years.”

With the world having a finite amount of minerals necessary for EV batteries, could it reach a point of indefinite cycling and reuse?

“I think we will be mining metals for the balance of my lifetime,” said Voelcker. “The hope is as batteries get more powerful, smaller, lighter and cheaper, with luck, we will need fewer metals.”

“Why would you get cobalt from Africa or lithium from South America, if you can get it here in Oklahoma City,” Spiers said. “The circular economy is happening. It’s happening right now. It’s happening here in Oklahoma City…the volume is still small, but it will get bigger and bigger.”

Technology

Europe sets its sights on multi-billion-euro gigawatt factories as it plays catch-up on AI

Published

1 hour ago

July 29, 2025

admin

Europe sets its sights on multi-billion-euro gigawatt factories as it plays catch-up on AI

Data storage tapes are stored at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which will house the U.S. supercomputer to be powered by Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin chips, in Berkeley, California, U.S. May 29, 2025.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Europe is setting its sights on gigawatt factories in a bid to bolster its lagging artificial intelligence industry and meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing sector.

Buzz around the concept of factories that industrialize manufacturing AI has gained ground in recent months, particularly as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stressed the importance of the infrastructure at a June event. Huang hailed a new “industrial revolution” at the GTC conference in Paris, France, and said his firm was working to help countries build revenue-generating AI factories through partnerships in France, Italy and the U.K.

For its part, the European Union describes the factories as a “dynamic ecosystem” that brings together computing power, data and talent to create AI models and applications.

The bloc has long been a laggard behind the U.S. and China in the race to scale up artificial intelligence. With 27 members in the union, the region is slower to act when it comes to agreeing new legislation. Higher energy costs, permitting delays and a grid in dire need of modernization can also hamper developments.

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty, told CNBC that the bloc’s goal is to bring together high quality data sets, computing capacity and researchers, all in one place.

“We have, for example, 30% more researchers per capita than the U.S. has, focused on AI. Also we have around 7,000 startups [that] are developing AI, but the main obstacle for them is that they have very limited computing capacity. And that’s why we decided that, together with our member states, we are investing in this very crucial infrastructure,” she said.

These are very big investments because they are four times more powerful when it comes to computing capacities than the biggest AI factories.

Henna Virkkunen

European Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty

“We have everything what is needed to be competitive in this sector, but at the same time we want to build up our technological sovereignty and our competitiveness.”

So far, the EU has put up 10 billion euros ($11.8 billion) in funding to set up 13 AI factories and 20 billion euros as a starting point for investment in the gigafactories, marking what it says is the “largest public investment in AI in the world.” The bloc has already received 76 expressions of interest in the gigafactories from 16 member states across 60 sites, Virkkunen said.

The call for interest in gigafactories was “overwhelming,” going far beyond the bloc’s expectations, Virkkunen noted. However, in order for the factories to make a noteworthy addition to Europe’s computing capacity, significantly more investment will be required from the private sector to fund the expensive infrastructure.

‘Intelligence revolution’

The EU describes the facilities as a “one-stop shop” for AI firms. They’re intended to mirror the process carried out in industrial factories, which transform raw materials into goods and services. With an AI factory, raw data goes into the input, and advanced AI products are the expected outcome.

It’s essentially a data center with additional infrastructure related to how the technology will be adopted, according to Andre Kukhnin, equity research analyst at UBS.

“The idea is to create GPU [graphics processing units] capacity, so to basically build data centers with GPUs that can train models and run inference… and then to create an infrastructure that allows you to make this accessible to SMEs and parties that would not be able to just go and build their own,” Kukhnin said.

How the facility will be used is key to its designation as an AI factory, adds Martin Wilkie, research analyst at Citi.

“You’re creating a platform by having these chips that have insane levels of compute capacity,” he said. “And if you’ve attached it to a grid that is able to get the power to actually use them to full capacity, then the world is at your feet. You have this enormous ability to do something, but what the success of it is, will be defined by what you use it for.”

Telecommunications firm Telenor is already exploring possible use cases for such facilities with the launch of its AI factory in Norway in November last year. The company currently has a small cluster of GPUs up and running, as it looks to test the market before scaling up.

Telenor’s Chief Innovation Officer and Head of the AI Factory Kaaren Hilsen and EVP Infrastructure Jannicke Hilland in front of a Nvidia rack at the firm’s AI factory

Telenor

“The journey started with a belief — Nvidia had a belief that every country needs to produce its own intelligence,” Telenor’s Chief Innovation Officer and Head of the AI Factory Kaaren Hilsen told CNBC.

Hilsen stressed that data sovereignty is key. “If you want to use AI to innovate and to make business more efficient, then you’re potentially putting business critical and business sensitive information into these AI models,” she said.

The company is working with BabelSpeak, which Hilsen described as a Norwegian version of ChatGPT. The technology translates sensitive dialogues, such as its pilot with the border police who can’t use public translation services because of security issues.

We’re experiencing an “intelligence revolution” whereby “sovereign AI factories can really help advance society,” Hilsen said.

Billion-euro investments

Virkkunen said the region’s first AI factory will be operational in coming weeks, with one of the biggest projects launching in Munich, Germany in the first days of September. It’s a different story for the gigafactories.

“These are very big investments because they are four times more powerful when it comes to computing capacities than the biggest AI factories, and it means billions in investments. Each of these need three to five billion [euros] in investment,” the commissioner said, adding that the bloc will look to set up a consortium of partners and then officially open a call for investment later this year.

Bertin Martens, senior research fellow at Bruegel, questioned why such investments needed to subsidized by government funds.

“We don’t know yet how much private investment has been proposed as a complement to the taxpayer subsidy, and what capacity and how big these factories are. This is still very much unclear at this stage, so it’s very hard to say how much this will add in terms of computing capacity,” he said.

Power consumption is also a key issue. Martens noted that building an AI gigafactory may take one to two years — but building a power generation of that size requires much more time.

“If you want to build a state-of-the-art gigafactory with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, you have to count on the power consumption of at least one gigawatt for one of those factories. Whether there’s enough space in Europe’s electricity grid in all of these countries to create those factories remains to be seen… this will require major investment in power regeneration capacity,” he told CNBC.

UBS forecasts that the current installed global data center capacity of 85 GW will double due to soaring demand. Based on the EU’s 20-billion-euro investment and the plan for each factory to run 100,000 advanced processors, UBS estimates each factory could be around 100-150 MW with a total capacity for all of the facilities of around 1.5-2 GW.

That could add around 15% to Europe’s total capacity — a sizeable boost, even when compared to the U.S., which currently owns around a third of global capacity, according to the data.

Following the announcement of the EU-U.S. trade framework, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday that U.S. AI chips will help power the bloc’s AI gigafactories in a bid to help the States “maintain their technological edge.”

“One could argue that it’s relatively easy, provided you have the money. It’s relatively easy to buy the chips from Nvidia and to create these hardware factories, but to make it run and to make it economically viable is a completely different question,” Martens told CNBC.

He said that the EU will likely have to start at a smaller scale, as the region is unable to immediately build its own frontier models in AI because of their expense.

“I think in time, Europe can gradually build up its infrastructure and its business models around AI to reach that stage, but that will not happen immediately,” Martens said.

Technology

India overtakes China in smartphone exports to the U.S. as manufacturing jumps 240%, report shows

Published

2 hours ago

July 29, 2025

admin

India overtakes China in smartphone exports to the U.S. as manufacturing jumps 240%, report shows

Workers assemble smartphones at Dixon Technologies’ Padget Electronics Pvt factory in Uttar Pradesh, India, on Jan. 28, 2021.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

India has overtaken China to become the top exporter of smartphones to the U.S., according to research firm Canalys, reflecting the shift in manufacturing supply chain away from Beijing amid tariff-fueled uncertainty.

Smartphones assembled in India accounted for 44% of U.S. imports of those devices in the second quarter, a significant increase from just 13% in the same period last year. Total volume of smartphones made in India soared 240% from a year earlier, Canalys said.

In contrast, the share of Chinese smartphone exports to the U.S. shrank to 25% in the quarter ended June, from 61% a year earlier, Canalys data released Monday showed. Vietnam’s share of smartphone exports to the U.S. was also higher than that of China at 30%.

The surge in shipments from India was primarily driven by Apple‘s accelerated shift toward the country at a time of heightened trade uncertainty between the U.S. and China, said Sanyam Chaurasia, principal analyst at Canalys. This is the first time India exported more smartphones to the U.S. than China.

Apple has reportedly been speeding up its plans to make most of its iPhones sold in the U.S. at factories in India this year, with the aim of manufacturing around a quarter of all iPhones in the country in the next few years.

Trump has threatened Apple with additional tariffs and urged the company’s CEO Tim Cook to make iPhones domestically, a move experts have said would be nearly impossible as it would push iPhone prices higher.

While many of Apple’s core products, including iPhones and Mac laptops, have received exemptions from Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs,” officials have warned that it could be a temporary reprieve.

Its global peers, Samsung Electronic and Motorola, have also been striving to move assembly for U.S.-bound smartphones to India, though their shift has been significantly slower and is limited in scale compared with Apple, according to Canalys.

Last-mile assembly

Many global manufacturers have been increasingly shifting their final assembly to India, allocating more capacity in the South-Asian nation to serve the U.S. market, said Renauld Anjoran, CEO of Agilian Technology, an electronics manufacturer in China.

The Guangdong-based company is now renovating a facility in India with plans to move part of its production to the country. “The plan for India is moving ahead as fast as we can,” Anjoran said. The company expects to begin trial production runs soon before ramping up to full-scale manufacturing.

While shipments, which represent the number of devices sent to retailers do not reflect final sales, they are a proxy for market demand.

Overall, iPhone shipments declined by 11% year on year to 13.3 million units in the second quarter, reversing the 25% growth in the prior quarter, according to Canalys.

Shares of Apple have tumbled 14% this year, partly on concerns over its high exposure to tariff uncertainty and intensifying competition in smartphones and artificial intelligence sector.

While the company has begun assembling iPhone 16 Pro models in India, it still relies heavily on China’s more mature manufacturing infrastructure to meet U.S. demand for the premium model, Canalys said.

In April, Trump imposed a 26% tariff on imports from India, much lower than the triple-digit tariffs on China at the time, before pausing those duties until an Aug 1. deadline.

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this story.

Technology

Waymo plans to bring its robotaxi service to Dallas in 2026

Published

6 hours ago

July 29, 2025

admin

Waymo plans to bring its robotaxi service to Dallas in 2026

A Waymo rider-only robotaxi is seen during a test ride in San Francisco, California, U.S., December 9, 2022.

Paresh Dave | Reuters

Alphabet’s Waymo unit plans on bringing its robotaxi service to Dallas next year, adding to a growing list of prospective U.S. markets for 2026, including Miami and Washington, D.C.

Rental car company Avis Budget Group will be managing the Waymo fleet in Dallas, via a new partnership the companies announced Monday.

Avis CEO Brian Choi said in a statement that the agreement marks a “milestone” for the company, which is now also working to become “a leading provider of fleet management, infrastructure and operations to the broader mobility ecosystem.”

Waymo robotaxi testing is already underway in downtown Dallas involving the company’s Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles with the Waymo Driver system. That combines automated driving software, sensors and other hardware that power the vehicles’ “level 4,” driverless operations.

Passengers will be able to hail a driverless ride using the Waymo app in Dallas. In some other markets, Waymo only makes its services available through ride-hailing platform Uber.

Waymo has surged ahead in the robotaxi market while other autonomous vehicle developers, including Tesla, Amazon-owned Zoox, and venture-backed startups such as Nuro, May Mobility and Wayve, are working to make autonomous transportation a commercial reality in the U.S.

Waymo says it conducts more than 250,000 paid weekly trips in the markets where it operates commercially, including Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.

Waymo’s steepest competition internationally comes from Baidu’s robotaxi venture Apollo Go in China, which is eyeing expansion in Europe.

On Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call, execs boasted that, “The Waymo Driver has now autonomously driven over 100 million miles on public roads, and the team is testing across more than 10 cities this year, including New York and Philadelphia.”

The business has become significant enough that Alphabet even added a category to its Other Bets revenue description in its latest quarterly filing.

“Revenues from Other Bets are generated primarily from the sale of autonomous transportation services, healthcare-related services and internet services,” the filing said.

The Other Bets segment remains relatively small, however, with revenue coming in at $373 million in the quarter, up from $365 million a year ago. The division still reported a loss of $1.25 billion, widening from $1.13 billion in the second quarter of 2024.

WATCH: Waymo co-CEO on 10 million driverless rides and Tesla’s coming robtaxi challenge