GM Energy launches Ultium Home charging with 3 bundles, vehicle-to-home capabilities
Eight months after sharing details of its new GM Energy business unit, General Motors has shared the first product specifications for its lineup of Ultium Home charging solutions designed for residential EV owners. The company will initially offer three distinct home energy management bundles, including capabilities for vehicle-to-home functionality and solar installations.
As one of the world’s largest automakers, GM has used the global burgeoning of EV adoption to not only remain relevant but to eventually become the industry leader. CEO Mary Barra has repeatedly shared GM’s intentions to dethrone longtime EV sales leader Tesla by mid-decade, but the American automaker has delivered slower progress than anticipated.
Just recently, Barra cited battery production (or lack thereof) as an inhibitor to growth in its EV lineup but said “it will be dramatically different” next year. Like rival Tesla, GM is developing and implementing several new business entities that will operate adjacent to EV manufacturing.
For example, GM continues to expand its Ultium Charge 360 network, which is soon to include a new network of coast-to-coast DC fast chargers across 500 Pilot and Flying J travel stations.
Last October, we learned that the Ultium Charge 360 network would be repositioned under a new business unit called GM Energy, which also includes holistic energy management solutions for both homes and businesses.
Today, GM Energy has shared the first product details of its Ultium Home products, which will consist of three separate bundles designed to suit the different energy needs of future GM EV drivers.
Ultium Home looks to give GM EV owners energy freedom
Per GM Energy, the three bundles arrive as the first energy solutions available to residential customers under the new Ultium Home product line. With them, GM hopes to provide EV owners with energy independence and resilient backup power to alleviate dependency on the local grid.
As you’ll see below, one of the key features of GM Energy’s new Ultium Home bundles is vehicle-to-home (V2H) capabilities. By installing a specific kit paired with a GM EV with bidirectional charging abilities, homeowners will soon be able to power their homes using their vehicle, whether during a climate emergency or peak grid hours.
GM’s new PowerBank can also pair with the V2H kit to enable additional stationary storage in addition to your EV’s battery pack, whether that excess energy is coming from the grid or solar panels on your roof. Speaking of which, GM Energy states future Ultium Home customers will also have the opportunity to have the sustainable tech installed atop their residences with the help of SunPower – GM Energy’s exclusive provider.
Below, you can see how the first three initial Ultium Home bundles have been organized.
- Ultium Home V2H Bundle
- GM PowerShift Charger
- Up to 19.2 kW charge speeds (AC)
- Enables vehicle-to-home (V2H) bi-directional charging with a compatible GM EV and V2H Enablement Kit (see below)
- V2H Enablement Kit
- Inverter, home hub, and dark start battery
- 9.6 kW of discharge power
- Safely disconnects the home from the grid
- GM PowerShift Charger
- Ultium Home Energy System
- GM PowerShift Charger (see details above)
- V2H Enablement Kit (details above)
- GM PowerBank
- Ultium Home’s stationary storage unit
- Connects to V2H Enablement Kit to extend backup capability and store solar or grid energy
- Available in 10.6 kWh (5 kW) and 17.7 kWh (7 kW) variants
- Ultium Home Energy Storage Bundle
- GM PowerBank
- Inverter and home hub
The company states that all of the new Ultium Home products will connect to one another via the GM Energy Cloud, allowing its owners to monitor and manage their energy usage and how that energy is dispersed across the Ultium products. GM Energy vice president Wade Sheffer spoke to the new product lineup rolling out:
As GM Energy’s ecosystem of connected products and services continues to expand, we’re excited to provide customers with options for greater energy management beyond the vehicle. Our initial Ultium Home offerings represent an opportunity for customers to take greater control over their personal energy independence and resiliency.
As you may have noticed, one very important detail left out by GM Energy today is pricing. All the energy unit has said so far is, “MSRP and timeline for delivery for each of Ultium Home’s initial product bundles will vary.” We’ve asked for more details but have yet to hear back.
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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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