BYD production snowballs as it celebrates rolling five millionth plug-in EV off the assembly line
While some EV automaker’s are working to deliver EV numbers in the tens of thousands, China’s Build Your Dreams (BYD) is on an entirely different level. The automotive manufacturing conglomerate is celebrating five million new energy vehicles (NEVs) built – a feat in it of itself, but an even greater tell to just how quickly BYD’s production lines are expanding.
Since its inception in 1995, BYD has quickly risen through the ranks as a major global manufacturer, excelling especially in electric vehicles and the battery technology. Including the commercial side of its new energy vehicles (BEVs and plug-in hybrids), BYD has a presence in 400 cities across more than 70 countries.
On the passenger side of EVs, we’ve seen BYD extent its footprint more recently to markets like Japan and Europe, delivering vehicles like the super popular ATTO 3. From a production standpoint, BYD builds NEVs beyond China, including plans for three new facilities in Brazil and a potential $1 billion plant in India that currently sits on shaky ground.
BYD describes itself as a “driving force in the industry” (not sure if pun was intended there but hope so), and it has the production clout to back it up. If you aren’t already aware of the BYD name, you soon will as the automaker continues to expand its lineup of brands, the EVs those marques offer, and the amount of assembly lines needed to keep up.
A better question is probably, can everyone else keep up?
BYD’s production ramp up outpaces… well, everyone
BYD Auto’s five millionth new energy vehicle to roll off its assembly lines in China was an N7 SUV from its Denza sub-brand (seen above). As it proclaims itself as the first global automaker to reach five million NEVs (BEVs and plug-in hybrids), BYD has a lot to celebrate – but a more impressive statistic is how quickly the manufacturer got here.
The company points out that it took 13 years to reach one million NEVs produced, but here’s where things get interesting. From there, it only took BYD Auto another 18 months to reach three million, then another 9 months from there to reach five million, helping garner over $1.86 million in sales last year.
Needless to say, BYD’s production lines are humming and showing no signs of slowing down. Per BYD chairman and president Wang Chuanfu:
Today marks a historic moment for BYD as we witness our 5 millionth new energy vehicle rolls off the production line. On this special occasion, we would like to extend our sincere gratitude to our customers across the globe for their trust in our products, our partners in the industry for this journey shared together, and every one of our employees whose hard work and dedication have made this landmark possible.
This year alone (through July), BYD says it has sold over 1.5 million, 92,469 of which came from markets outside of China like Europe for instance. While that’s a relatively small number compared to overall sales, it’s already more than double the company’s 2022 total – a sure sign that sales (and coinciding production levels) are on track to grow as BYD continues expanding to new territories.
Looking ahead, BYD looks to continue to invest big bucks in R&D and continue to expand its quest to become a household name around the globe. Per its release:
In the future, BYD, already taking the lead in the new energy revolution, will remain true to its aspiration of eco-friendliness and provide better mobility experiences to more customers around the world, accelerating the transition towards a greener future and contributing to its vision to Cool the Earth by 1°C.
Check out a video of the 5 millionth NEV celebration here:
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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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