Volkswagen is in talks with Tesla to adopt NACS connector
Volkswagen confirmed that it is in talks with Tesla to adopt the NACS connector for its electric vehicles in North America.
The news comes after Electrify America, which was founded by Volkswagen, announced the adoption of NACS.
Over the last month, Tesla managed to convince virtually all major American automakers to switch to its newly opened connector standard; NACS.
Ford was first to jump on board with GM and Rivian following shortly after.
Volvo and Polestar, which are owned by China’s Geely, have also followed this week.
But the European, or more specifically German, automakers, as well as the Asian automakers, have yet to jump on the NACS.
Earlier today, Electrify America, a charging station operator founded by Volkswagen as part of its settlement over the Dieselgate standard, confirmed it would produce stations with NACS connector.
That was a good sign for the Volkswagen Group to be the first German automaker to adopt the standard in North America.
Sure enough, the Volkswagen Group confirmed today that it is in active discussion with Tesla to adopt NACS. A spokesperson shared in an email today:
Volkswagen Group and its brands are currently evaluating the implementation of the Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) for its North American customers.
The group specifically mentioned its “brands”, which could mean that all VW, Audi, and Porsche brands might adopt it simultaneously.
Electrek’s Take
It would likely be the “coup de grace” for CCS in North America. I think BMW and Merceds-Benz would quickly follow.
Now you would just need the Japanese and Korean to follow, namely, Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai/Kia.
I wouldn’t be surprised if those were waiting for NACS to become an official standard, which we just learned is in motion through SAE International.
I can’t believe it to be honest. I was hoping for it, but if you would have told me that we would be here 6 months ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Congrats Tesla and I think Aptera is also partly responsible for all of this in a strange way.
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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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