Toyota to test new electric pickup as it looks to fend off BYD’s surge in Thailand
As Chinese automakers like BYD steal Toyota’s limelight in Thailand, the automaker is planning a counter-offensive. Toyota is set to test a new electric pickup to fend off the incoming competition.
Toyota unveiled its first electric pickup, the HiLux BEV, nearly a year ago for its 60th anniversary in Thailand.
Pickups are a critical part of Thailand’s auto industry, accounting for around 50% of all vehicles sold in 2022. According to research from MarkLines (via Reuters), Toyota claimed 39% of the one-ton pickup market through September.
Thailand is also Toyota’s fourth-highest production center behind Japan, China, and the US. However, the country is quickly going electric.
Although Toyota, Isuzu, and Honda are still the top-selling brands in Thailand, BYD and other Chinese EV makers are surging ahead.
BYD, which entered the market last July, already accounts for over a third of EV sales. It also surpassed Nissan, Mazda, and Mitsubishi to represent around 4% of new vehicle sales, according to AutoLife Thailand.
Toyota to counter BYD with electric pickup in Thailand
Toyota Thailand built the HiLux BEV and sent it to Australia last month for testing. The electric pickup was tested by local engineers and “large-volume” HiLux buyers to provide feedback.
Toyota Australia sales boss Sean Hanley, who drove the EV truck, said, “It’s clear the concept vehicle’s all-electric powertrain delivers the impressive torque you’d normally expect from a diesel engine.”
Pras Ganesh, executive vice president of Toyota Daihatsu Engineering & Manufacturing, said the company was adapting its electric pickup to local conditions. It’s also ramping up electric vehicle R&D in the nation to keep pace with incoming competition.
Ganesh told Reuters, “We will first start looking at public transit.” He added a few electric pickups will be tested in Pattaya next year as “songthaews,” or share taxis.
Toyota is also considering testing other electric trucks for different uses, such as last-mile delivery.
Meanwhile, BYD is working on its electric pickup truck. The EV truck was spotted last month during the final phases of testing earlier this year with a big “BYD” logo up front, rugged fenders, and four doors.
A leaked patent last month gave us a closer look at the Ford F-150 Lightning look-alike. Reports suggest the electric pickup will be around 209″ long, more in line with the Ford Ranger.
Toyota showed off another electric pickup concept at the Japan Mobility Show last month. The Toyota EPU, or Electric PickUp, could rival the Ford Maverick as a midsize EV pickup.
Other Chinese automakers, such as Geely’s Radar, have already begun shipping electric trucks to Thailand.
Electrek’s Take
With the HiLux being the best-selling vehicle over the past seven years, it only makes sense for an electric version.
Thailand’s government wants 30% of vehicles built in the country to be electric by the end of the decade. EVs account for over 10% of total car sales, up from 1% last year. Other automakers, including BYD, are taking advantage of the transition.
Toyota is feeling the urgency in a critical market to go electric. Another top Japanese automaker, Isuzu, plans to release an electric version of its D-Max pickup in the nation.
The electric HiLux BEV will likely do well in Thailand, but Toyota will need to get a move on.
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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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