BMW unveils 2025 i4 with a reimagined gloss black front end and sportier digitized interior
BMW USA has shared initial details of its 2025 model year i4 EV ahead of the all-electric sedan’s official launch this summer. Updates include a redesigned front fascia (all hail the kidney!), new exterior colors, and a digitized interior with sportier textiles.
The BMW i4 debuted as a 2022 model-year sedan, which we at Electrek have had the chance to test out multiple times (with mostly nice things to say about it). It’s not the flashiest or most powerful of the BMW “i” line of BEVs and has been updated with lower specs to make it one of the German automaker’s most affordable models.
In fact, the version of the i4 before today’s incoming 2025 model is BMW’s most affordable EV lease option. Last summer, we saw BMW introduce a new variant of the 2024 i4 called xDrive40, positioned between the dual-motor i4 M50 and the single-motor i4 eDrive40.
Today, BMW USA has begun teasing its 2025 i4 models, including a redesigned M50 xDrive.
BMW shares new 2025 i4 details, just no pricing yet
Per BMW USA, the 2025 model year versions of the i4 BEVs have received cosmetic updates inside and out. The German automaker states the sedan’s slim headlights and vertical kidney grille have been refreshed. The former sees adaptive single LED modules that generate a “Welcome Light” animation when the drive gets within ten feet.
The latter gains a new matte chrome finish and its upper section has been fully enclosed to further showcase its high-gloss black finish (seen above). The M Sport package of the 2025 BMW i4 now also includes a lower diffuser in the rear bumper, finished in high-gloss black to match its air intakes on the front fascia. Those elements were Cerium Grey in previous i4 models.
New exterior colors have been added as configurable options, including Cape York Green metallic and Vegas Red metallic. Future 2025 BMW i4 customers will also be able to select from several new alloy wheel options, including 19-inch M Aero bi-color wheels available in the M Sport package.
Inside the 2025 i4, BMW said it focused on providing digitalization and “a sharper sporting profile.” A new QuickSelect feature in iDrive reduces the number of physical buttons in the cockpit, and additional features can be activated via touch on the sedan’s center display, including climate control and seat/steering wheel heating. Here are some more deets, per the release:
The new BMW i4 and new BMW 4 Series Gran Coupe are fitted as standard with sport seats in perforated Sensatec. Vernasca leather trim with decorative quilting is available in five colors, including the new bi-color Black with Red Highlight.
2025 BMW i4s and new BMW 4 Series Gran Coupes come standard with a two-spoke steering wheel with polygonal rim and illuminated multifunction buttons. Adding the M Sport Package now brings an M leather steering wheel in a three-spoke design with a flat-bottomed rim and a black center stripe marking the 12 o’clock position. The three-spoke M leather steering wheel standard on the i4 M50 xDrive and M440i models additionally features M tricolor stitching and a red stripe at top dead center.
The new EVs will arrive powered by BMW Operating System 8.5, which will enable updated cloud-based BMW Maps navigation and more holistic access to the My BMW App. Two elements BMW’s press release lacks are any mention of upgrades to the 2025 i4’s performance and what its variants will cost when they launch.
The automaker says pricing will be announced soon, ahead of the official launch of the 2025 i4 in July 2024. The BEVs continue to be built near BMW’s headquarters in Munich, Germany. Here’s a look at the European version of the i4 while we await more details.
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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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