Ahead of its full Q4 report and 2023 sales breakdown, Mercedes-Benz USA has posted some of its sales numbers, which are encouraging overall, especially in the growing segment of BEVs, which saw nearly 250% growth year-over-year.
German automaker Mercedes-Benz remains one of the leaders amongst its legacy OEM competitors in electrification. The automaker has invested big bucks in eventually electrifying its entire global lineup while still delivering the luxury and performance the near century-old brand is known for.
We’ve seen the German automaker make enormous strides around the globe, including in the US, where its electric SUVs are currently being built. To support its growing arsenal of all-electric luxury vehicles, we’ve also seen Mercedes begin rolling out its own network of luxe charging stations – starting at its US headquarters near Atlanta before expanding to additional territories in Europe and China.
This week at CES, Mercedes-Benz’s booth in the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center was all-EV, painting an exciting future of vehicles like the G-Class EV (despite its horrendous wrap job) and a concept CLA EV – amongst several adjacent technologies debuting like a new AI assistant in its MBUX.
With more and more offerings, Mercedes-Benz USA reports continued sales growth in 2023, while the rest of its vehicles merely hold steady.
Source: Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz 2023 sales show encouraging EV growth
According to a post from Mercedes-Benz USA this morning, its overall sales for Q4 2023 were 90,014 vehicles – up 2% compared to Q2 2022. That total includes 17,701 units from Mercedes-Benz Vans; the rest were passenger cars.
For all of 2023, Mercedes-Benz USA is reporting 351,746 vehicles sold, up by only 0.2% compared to a year prior. Top-end and Can sales are up year-over-year, while Mercedes’ core vehicles are down 4%. While vehicle sales have held relatively steady overall, Mercedes brand EVs are touting the most growth.
For example, Mercedes USA sold 8,989 EQS SUVs in 2023, increasing 216% from last year and leading the automaker’s top-tier segment in growth. Mercedes states that EQE Sedan sales reached 1,195 units in the US in Q4 2023, increasing 211% compared to Q4 2022.
Overall, Mercedes-Benz USA sold 43,202 EVs in 2023, representing 248% sales growth year-over-year. EVs also represented 15% of all passenger vehicle sales in the US this year. Per Mercedes-Benz USA president and CEO Dimitris Psillakis:
Our 2023 sales results demonstrate another year of strong brand and volume growth for Mercedes-Benz USA. In partnership with the best dealer network in the country, we delivered on our future-forward strategy to significantly grow Top-End Vehicle (TEV) and Electric Vehicle (EV) sales—with EVs comprising 15% of total passenger car sales, and TEV and EVs accounting for nearly half of total sales for the year. We have and will continue to focus relentlessly on transforming both the digital and physical experience for our customers, whether revitalizing stores with our dealer partners or building world-class digital tools that underpin our award-winning product portfolio. And with the all-new E-Class, CLE, AMG GT, G-Class with Electric Technology, eSprinter and more arriving at dealerships in the months ahead, 2024 is poised for even greater success.
It will be interesting to see how Mercedes USA’s numbers compare to the rest of the German auto group’s sales and how this growth will look this time next year, especially as several other automakers dial back their electrification strategies.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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.
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Redwood will use the new capital to expand energy storage deployments, refining and materials production capacity, and its engineering and operations teams.
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