Toyota shareholders protest EV stance with votes to oust longtime leader from the board
Toyota shareholders are sending a clear message at the Japanese automaker’s annual meeting this year – it’s time to go electric. Several investors have mentioned they have voted or plan to vote to remove longtime leader Akio Toyoda from the board over the automaker’s EV stance.
Shareholders voice their opinion on Toyota’s EV stance
After Akio Toyoda, the 66-year-old grandson to the company’s founder, stepped down as CEO in January, many believed newly elected leader Koji Sato would bring the automaker into the modern era.
Toyoda has been one of the most vocal critics of going all in on EVs, insisting on sticking to a hybrid strategy despite the industry moving to an all-electric future.
Although Sato explained under his leadership the automaker would “accelerate BEV development with a new approach,” shareholders are still not thrilled with the progress.
In particular, they are pointing out Toyota’s EV stance on not setting a date to go all-electric. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Shareholders including the New York City comptrollers office, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and several European asset managers said they have voted or plan to vote to oust several Toyota directors including Toyoda from their board seats at the meeting Wednesday.
They say their vote is a way of protesting against Toyoda’s policy of not setting a date to go all-electric like most automakers have.
Brad Lander, the NYC comptroller, explained his vote, saying, “Toyota is failing to lean, like its peers, into a timely transition to an electric fleet.” He continued to say:
We want to be persuaded that there is a transition under way and that they’ll take meaningful steps toward an all-EV commitment.
Under its newly elected leader, Toyota has made a series of announcements to help speed up the rollout. The Japanese automaker revealed it would develop a dedicated EV platform as well as introduce ten new EV models by 2026.
One of the first will be a three-row SUV, its first US-assembled electric model set for production in 2025 at Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky facility.
Toyota has also teased several EV concepts, including an electric family SUV (bZ FlexSpace) and a sport crossover (bZ Sport Crossover).
In addition to its first global EV, the bZ4X, Toyota released an electric sedan (bZ3) in China as it looks to keep pace in a rapidly changing market.
However, Sato has yet to set a date to go all-electric, and that’s what shareholders want to know now. When exactly will Toyota be an EV-only automaker?
Electrek’s Take
Although the chances are slim that Toyota will be removed from the board, the votes are being used as a way of protesting to push for change within the company.
While most automakers are already achieving double-digit or 100% EV sales, Toyota continues to fall further behind the pack.
Investors are realizing that Toyota is missing out on profits in key regions like the US, Europe, and China, where EV sales are soaring. With the trend only expected to accelerate, shareholders are getting sick of waiting around while Toyota continues to delay an all-electric future.
The Japanese automaker is aiming for at least 1.5 million EV sales by 2026. For comparison, Tesla produced over 440,000 EVs in the first three months of 2023, delivering over 422,000.
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Charging network IONNA is partnering with Casey’s, one of the US’s largest convenience store and pizza chains, to bring DC fast charging to EV drivers across the Midwest.
Starting this year, Casey’s customers can plug into IONNA’s 400 kW charging stations while grabbing a slice or stocking up on road-trip essentials. Eight “Rechargeries” are already under construction in six states and are expected to open in 2025:
- Little Rock, Arkansas
- Vernon Hills, Illinois
- McHenry, Illinois
- Terre Haute, Indiana
- Parkville, Missouri
- Kearney, Missouri
- Blackwell, Oklahoma
- Waco, Texas
The Casey’s deal pushes IONNA past 900 charging bays in construction or operation — more than double what it had just three months ago. IONNA says the partnership will “expand,” but doesn’t provide specifics.
“This partnership with Casey’s is key to expanding our presence in America’s heartland,” said IONNA CEO Seth Cutler. “With a shared respect and commitment to delivering quality customer experience, we are pleased to add Casey’s to our growing network of partners.”
IONNA is a joint venture backed by eight of the world’s biggest automakers – BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota – working to rapidly scale a DC fast-charging network in the US.
Read more: Wawa is getting ultra-fast EV chargers from IONNA
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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