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News came out on Friday that President Biden is set to quadruple tariffs on Chinese EVs to protect the US auto industry from the rapid growth of Chinese EV manufacturing.

But instead of just de facto banning the competition from giving Americans access to affordable hot new EVs, the US should instead try making affordable hot new EVs itself.

The global auto industry is in a time of flux.

Cars are changing quickly, as is car manufacturing. The leaders of today, and of the last half-century, are not guaranteed to remain the leaders in the face of new entrants and new technology. And most of all, a new powertrain – electric – that will account for roughly 100% of cars on the road within a couple decades, which no serious person disputes.

Further, as one of the most polluting sectors globally and the most polluting in rich countries, it is necessary that transportation clean up its act, and fast, in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The sooner this happens, the easier it will be for all of us.

The new entrants to car manufacturing aren’t just in the form of startups like Tesla or Rivian, but in the form of nations which previously did not have a large presence in international auto manufacturing, but will take advantage of this flux to become more competitive in a changing global market.

The largest of these new entrants is the second most populous country in the world, the world’s largest exporter and its second-largest economy: China. China has heretofore not been a major player in car exports, but that’s changing.

China has been spending the last couple decades building up its manufacturing base, particularly in electronics, and particularly focusing on securing raw material supplies and partnerships and on building up refining capacity.

The strongest move in this respect has been Xi Jinping’s centerpiece Belt and Road Initiative, a set of policies intended to secure trade routes and mineral partnerships between China and less-developed, mineral-rich countries, generally in exchange for infrastructure development. It’s not unlike the actions of the West via the IMF and the World Bank, investing in development of poorer countries in order to secure material partnerships.

All of these entities have been credibly accused of exploitative actions towards the developing world – generally utilizing terms like economic imperialism, debt-trap diplomacy, or neocolonialism.

But the point of this is that China has been getting ready for this transition for a long time through concerted national effort, whereas the US is only recently doing so (via the Inflation Reduction Act and its attempts to onshore/”friend-shore” EV manufacturing and sourcing).

Japan and the 1970s as parable

We have, in fact, seen this story before. In the 1970s, the US auto industry was rocked by dual crises, a gas price crisis that left their large, gas-guzzling vehicles less competitive, and a steel crisis which greatly affected US steel manufacturers.

The steel crisis came courtesy of Japan, a country whose manufacturing methods far outstripped America’s, and which was determined to undercut American steel. It could produce steel cheaper and better than the US, and the low prices that Japan was offering were simply unbeatable by American manufacturers. As a result, many American steelworkers lost their jobs.

Here’s an article about the steel crisis from 2021 from the Alliance for American Manufacturing, which makes parallels to today’s situation between the US and China. In it, former steelworkers are quoted about what happened at the time:

The cost was cheaper, and their quality was better, too. We didn’t care about quality because we were the only game in town forever.

-Ed Cook, former president USW Local 3069

The U.S. steelmakers and, as time wore on, the automakers, were being outperformed by Japan and their superior technology advancements. Our employers didn’t invest in new technology until recognizing the concept of foreign competition was here to stay.

-Doug May, retired steelworker

The US tried to stop the bleeding with tariffs after accusing Japan of illegally “dumping” steel at unfairly subsidized below-market rates to gain export market share. But the tariffs didn’t stop the advancement of the technologically-superior Japanese steel industry, which remained strong even after their imposition.

The early-70s steel crisis was soon joined by the mid-to-late-70s oil crisis, where the US (and much of the Western world) saw oil shortages and high gas prices. At the time, American automakers mostly produced giant gas guzzlers, and Japanese automakers exploited this crisis by rapidly introducing smaller, more fuel efficient cars to America, just as the environmental movement was starting to gain steam and emissions regulations were starting to take effect.

Automakers responded by undergoing half-baked attempts to meet the standards while still trying to sell their gas guzzlers, by lobbying governments not to implement regulations, and begging for tariffs against competing Japanese autos. Not by actually rising to the challenge and making better vehicles, but rather by asking for the rules to be changed so they could get a free win by doing nothing new.

Eventually, Japan agreed to voluntary export restrictions and US automakers managed to get in gear and start making better cars. But as a result of this disruption in the 1970s, Japan is still considered one of the premier manufacturing industries in the world (automotive and otherwise), and has held the crown of the largest auto-exporting country on the globe for decades.

Between preparation, determination, and opportunity, Japan was able to gain a lasting lead.

Does any of this sound familiar?

China is the new Japan

Well, Japan was the world’s largest auto exporter… until now. It depends on how you count it, but Japan was likely dethroned by China as the world’s largest car exporter in the past year.

All of China’s effort to build EV manufacturing bore fruit – while the country was initially slow to adopt EVs, in 2023 it had a whopping 37% EV market share (up from 5% in 2020 and .84% in 2015), leapfrogging several early adopter nations. But EV manufacturing has grown even faster, with Chinese EV production outpacing domestic demand and exports rising rapidly in recent years as well.

Why did this happen? It turns out, Japanese industry is acting similarly to US industry at the moment, in that it is dragging its feet on electric vehicles (in fact, even moreso than US manufacturers are). European manufacturers, too, are trying to slow the transition down. Automakers are even cutting production plans in a rapidly growing EV market, possibly in a cynical move to influence regulations, even though it’s clear their targets are too low already.

While Biden has pushed for stronger emissions standards, automakers seem determined to lobby against progress, to give themselves a false sense of security that they can take their sweet time in transitioning to EVs.

But regardless of how much automakers kick and scream about needing to build something other than massive gas guzzling land yachts, technology and world industry will continue their inexorable advancement. The industry can catch up, or it can continue dragging its feet and moving slower than its competition, somehow hoping to catch up from the losing position it’s already in.

None of this kicking and screaming is happening in China.

As mentioned above, Chinese government has focused heavily on securing materials and on encouraging upstart EV makers (with a total of either $29 billion or $173 billion in subsidies from 2009-2022, depending on whose numbers you accept, either of which are less than the hundreds of billions in subsidy allocated by the US in the Inflation Reduction Act, or the $7 trillion global subsidy for fossil fuels).

And Chinese EV makers aren’t playing a silly game of limiting their own commitments in order to push a myth of falling sales (that said, Chinese dealer associations were granted a mere 6-month pause in regulations responding to a glut of unsellable gas cars – while also demanding that automakers stop building noncompliant vehicles immediately). Instead, they’re building cars as fast as they can, selling them as fast as they can, and exporting them in as many ships as they can get their hands on – to the point where they’re even building ships of their own.

This has led to accusations that China is “dumping” EVs on overseas markets, with Europe – which also subsidizes its own EV industry – considering retroactive tariffs. The US is also set to announce a 4x increase in existing tariffs against Chinese EVs. The irony is, if Chinese taxpayers are subsidizing manufacturing before sending those cars overseas, that represents a wealth transfer from Chinese taxpayers to American ones. And another irony: China has so often been criticized for not doing enough on climate change, and now we’re criticizing them of doing too much, both with EVs and solar.

This all sounds quite similar to the situation with Japan in the 70s.

But just as with Japan, simply blocking out better options won’t kick the West’s industry into gear. On the contrary, it will make our industry more complacent. And we’re already seeing that happening, as automakers keep begging governments to let them continue their unsustainable business models even as competition looms.

Do tariffs work?

But that’s just the thing, tariffs don’t generally work. We saw how they failed to forestall Japan, but there are many other examples showing their ineffectiveness or weird side effects, and economists generally agree that they are a poor measure to help domestic industry. Some company leadership favors the idea of tariffs, while other (perhaps more sober) leaders do not.

On the one hand, it could help domestic auto jobs, because free trade for Chinese EVs could result in a race to the bottom for auto manufacturing. And it could result in Chinese companies trying to set up manufacturing in the US to avoid tariffs – which could help US auto jobs, but these moves would likely spark a whole new round of controversy when announced.

But on the other hand, China is likely to implement retaliatory tariffs which will hurt US workers (for example, soybean tariffs which ruined the US soybean industry in 2018 – and resulted in more soybean demand from Brazil, which led to extensive clearcutting and fires in the Amazon). And the nature of today’s globalized economy and complex supplier relationships around the world can result in a lot of chaos when a major player implements a major tariff.

So in the end, US jobs likely won’t benefit overall, and US consumers will simply be denied a chance to buy cheap new EVs from China – like, for example, the excellent Volvo EX30. The EX30 is currently made in Geely’s China factory and starts at around $35k even after the 25% tariff.

A 100% tariff would bring it to a starting price of ~$54k instead (unless or until Geely moves production out of China, something BYD has also considered). The EX30 also happens to be one of the only small EVs that will be available in the US in the near term, so a tariff would further doom US consumers to the plague of SUVs that has befallen us.

By raising prices of vehicles that could undercut US autos, what this means is that inflation – the price of goods for US consumers, which includes autos – will increase. Cars will be more expensive as US manufacturers will have less competition, less reason to bring costs down, and less reason to offer reasonably-sized models. We’ll be stuck with the expensive land yachts that US automakers have been punting at us for so many years. People will continue to accuse EVs of being too expensive – as a result of policy that directly makes them so.

Meanwhile, one of Biden’s signature legislative wins, the Inflation Reduction Act, does include a different type of protectionist provision that seems to have accomplished its goals. It offers tax credits to EV purchasers, as long as those EVs include domestically-sourced components and are assembled in North America. This lowers the effective price of EVs, helping buyers, and stimulates investment in US manufacturing as well.

As a result of this and Biden’s previous Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, $209 billion has been invested in new or expanded factory projects, which will create 241,000 EV jobs in America. So it’s not impossible to incentivize domestic production – but smart industrial policy and subsidies will generally work better than unnecessary trade wars.

The politics factor

Of course there is a large short-term factor to this decision: the US election, which is just a few months out.

In this election, President Biden is running against a candidate who has no issue being loudly racist, and channels that racism into protectionist trade measures. The US’ current 25% tariff against China was implemented by him in 2018, and a centerpiece of his policy promises revolve around extending these short-sighted measures.

This trade policy is not made out of a consideration of what will be best for the auto industry or the US, but rather is a populist way to seize on Sinophobia, scapegoating the US’ main geopolitical competitor for various social ills happening domestically.

But that sort of sentiment is popular. US sentiment towards China is at record lows, making it a popular target for scapegoating. The sharp turn downwards in recent years is likely influenced by the loud scapegoating from Mr Trump, though it has affected voters across the party identification spectrum.

So Biden’s decision to increase tariffs on Chinese EVs may end up being popular, regardless of its positive or negative effects – after all, Trump’s previous round hurt the US economy, but was still popular.

Protectionism is, after all, historically popular with industrial unions. Biden has secured support from the UAW, a group that has been racking up a lot of impressive wins lately, and wants to expand union power further (for which it has the support of the President). UAW has asked for higher tariffs, and Biden has taken their advice before.

But it is also good to remember that this election is indeed important. While President Biden’s tariff policy mirrors that of Mr. Trump, Biden’s overall environmental policy does stand out as head and shoulders above the destructive, ill-considered nonsense we saw from the EPA under fossil fuel advocates Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler.

On EVs specifically, Mr. Trump has already begged for $1 billion in bribes from oil companies (soon after scrambling to make bond in his half-billion-dollar fraud case), promising that if they give him these bribes, he would try again to kill electric vehicles (which he failed at last time) – in a move that would actually benefit the Chinese auto industry, and would harm US consumers’ health and pocketbooks.

So while this EV tariff increase doesn’t seem like a great idea, the alternative is, somehow, much worse. Isn’t that just the story of US politics in a nutshell.

But will the tariff change minds? While tariffs are popular, Trump has associated himself so closely with protectionist trade policy that voters with a thirst for protectionism seem more likely to vote for the candidate that has done more to shout his bombastic racist ideas from the rooftops.

It does seem that, with anti-Chinese sentiment at an all time high, any mention of China short-circuits a certain percentage of the electorate. Despite the demonstrably positive effect that Biden’s EV policy has produced in terms of investment in US EV manufacturing, that very same policy is often ignorantly criticized for helping China – which it does not do. Just have a look in the comments below, we’re sure a number of people who did not get this far into the article will echo exactly this incorrect sentiment.

But that’s a hard thing to explain, which has taken me thousands of words already (sorry) to merely scratch the surface of. The simplicity of “China bad” is a lot more comforting and simple to accept, despite lacking nuance.

How do we beat China? Not by tariffs, but by trying harder

Apologies for taking so long to get around to the point, but I hope that after laying out the actions China has taken to grow its EV industry, the history of foreign entrants into the auto industry, the effectiveness of tariffs, and the effectiveness of other trade policies and the politics behind them, the conclusion of how to go forward is already clear.

In order to beat China, we need to stop messing around with comforting but ill-considered policies that won’t work, and instead commit ourselves to the massive industrial shift that we need in order to catch up with a country that has already been doing so for over a decade.

We cannot do this by moving slower than a target that is already ahead of us. We have to move faster. And the West doesn’t get there by taking $1 billion in bribes to tank domestic industry, by softening targets or backtracking on EV plans. In particular, having one party that actively opposes any attempt to prepare the US auto industry for the future is certainly not helpful. This back-and-forth is not happening in China – they are committed.

The US auto industry has become accustomed to offering huge, expensive gas guzzlers, and to being “the only game in town.” But that didn’t work for the US in the 70s, and it won’t work now.

One of the most common criticisms of EVs is their unaffordability, but the BYD Seagull will cost under $10k (domestically) and the sporty Xiaomi SU7 is about $30k. That might be hard to compete with, but the US has already seen a cheap, great EV in the form of the workmanlike Chevy Bolt, which cost under $20k new after incentives before production ended. So it’s possible, and just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.

Even if prices on small Chinese EVs are unattainable, the way to solve that is through smart industrial and materials policy (as China has spent years on and we’ve only just started), through targeted subsidy to a new and important industry (which we’re doing, though republicans want to eliminate that), and by perhaps redirecting tax breaks that currently encourage giant vehicles to stop encouraging huge gas guzzlers and instead encourage right-sized EVs (and end other policies like the EPA footprint rule which EPA is finally doing something about).

Then there’s the little issue of massive implicit subsidies to fossil fuels, costing the US economy $700 billion per year. The solution to that is to put a price on pollution, as supported by virtually all economists and a majority of Americans in every state, which would help to incentivize cleaner autos and disincentivize dirtier ones. And all of this is necessary to confront climate change, which we can do alongside taking actions to ensure we are ready for the future of automobiles.

So, if you’ll forgive me for taking this apparently unpopular anti-tariff stance, I think it’s clear that simply doubling the price of the competition isn’t the best way to ensure US auto stays competitive. It won’t help US consumers, it likely won’t have a net positive effect on US jobs (across sectors), it will lull industry into a false sense of security, it doesn’t help the environment, and perhaps least important but still worth mention, it violates the oft-repeated-but-never-honestly-held principle that government should “avoid picking winners and losers.”

Instead, lets focus on encouraging the new tech and discouraging the old tech, and moving quickly to beat China at their own game. If we want to pick winners, then why don’t we pick us.

This is how we get the American auto industry, a jewel in the crown of America for more than a century, into competitive shape for the future. We should have been doing more earlier, but as the famous (possibly Chinese) proverb says: “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today.”

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Altman, Huang and the last-minute negotiations that sealed the $100 billion OpenAI-Nvidia deal

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Altman, Huang and the last-minute negotiations that sealed the 0 billion OpenAI-Nvidia deal

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (L), and Jensen Huang CEO of Nvidia.

Reuters

ABILENE, Texas – Sam Altman had a deadline. OpenAI’s CEO was headed to Texas to unveil his company’s next big infrastructure push, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wanted in on the action.

Through a series of hurried negotiations, late-night calls and last-minute contract tweaks, the two giants of artificial intelligence struck a $100 billion partnership on Monday, hours before Altman boarded his flight to Abilene, a city of about 130,000 residents roughly 180 miles west of Dallas.

It helped that Huang and Altman had been part of President Donald Trump’s state visit to the U.K. a week earlier, allowing the president to be briefed on the agreement days in advance. 

The deal, which Huang described to CNBC as “monumental in size,” marks a watershed moment in the tech industry, as capital and influence are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the two companies closest to the heart of the artificial intelligence boom.

Huang now presides over the world’s most valuable public company, worth nearly $4.5 trillion after gaining $170 billion following Monday’s announcement, while Altman runs the most prominent startup on the planet, valued at half a trillion dollars.

OpenAI’s ascent to the forefront of generative AI has relied on Nvidia’s high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs). Now the companies are more intimately linked than ever, as they plan to carve a path to jointly building the next wave of AI supercomputing facilities.

“You should expect a lot from us in the coming months,” Altman told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley headquarters on Monday. “There are three things that OpenAI has to do well: we have to do great AI research, we have to make these products people want to use, and we have to figure out how to do this unprecedented infrastructure challenge.”

Altman and Huang negotiated their pact largely through a mix of virtual discussions and one-on-one meetings in London, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., with no bankers involved, according to people close to the talks who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

The arrangement calls for Nvidia to invest $10 billion at a time in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. As the buildout unfolds, Nvidia will also supply the cutting-edge processors powering a host of new data centers.

While OpenAI gets more intimate with Nvidia, it has to maneuver through a number of high-stakes relationships with other key partners.

OpenAI only informed Microsoft, its principal shareholder and primary cloud provider, a day before the deal was signed, the people familiar with the matter said. Earlier this year, Microsoft lost its status as OpenAI’s exclusive provider of computing capacity.

The pact also comes less than two weeks after a disclosure from Oracle indicated that OpenAI agreed to spend $300 billion in computing power with the company over about five years, starting in 2027. At the start of the year, OpenAI joined Stargate, a multibillion-dollar project announced by President Trump and backed by Oracle and SoftBank, to build out next-generation AI infrastructure.

Going forward, all of OpenAI’s infrastructure projects will fall under the Stargate umbrella.

Representatives from Microsoft, Oracle and SoftBank didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nvidia and OpenAI provided scant details about where and when the buildout will take place, other than to say that the first of the 10 gigawatt sites will go online in the back half of next year.

Executives said they’ve reviewed between 700 and 800 potential locations since unveiling Stargate in January. In the months that followed, they fielded a flood of proposals from developers across North America offering land, power, and facilities. That list has been narrowed as OpenAI weighs energy availability, permitting timelines, and financing terms, the company said.

In Monday’s announcement, OpenAI described Nvidia as a “preferred” partner. But executives told CNBC that it’s not an exclusive relationship, and the company is continuing to work with large cloud companies and other chipmakers to avoid being locked in to a single vendor.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang arrive to attend the State Banquet during U.S. President Donald Trump’s state visit, at Windsor Castle, in Windsor, Britain, September 17, 2025.

Phil Noble | Reuters

For Nvidia, the investment in OpenAI is historic in size, but it’s just a big piece of a rapidly expanding portfolio.

Last week, Nvidia put $5 billion into Intel as part of a joint venture to co-develop data center and PC chips with the troubled chipmaker. Nvidia also said it invested close to $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale, a move that resembles Nvidia’s backing of U.S. AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which held its IPO in March.

Tranches of money

The financing structure for the OpenAI deal is designed to avoid hefty dilution. The initial $10 billion tranche is locked in at a $500 billion valuation and expected to close within a month or so once the transaction has been finalized, people familiar with the matter said. Nine successive $10 billion rounds are planned, each to be priced at the company’s then-current valuation as new capacity comes online, they said.

The relationship between Nvidia and OpenAI long predates the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

Back when OpenAI was still a small nonprofit research lab and Nvidia was best known for building graphics chips for video games, Huang personally delivered his company’s first DGX supercomputer to OpenAI’s office in 2016. At the time, the startup was located in San Francisco’s Mission District, in a building that’s now home to Elon Musk’s xAI.

Almost a decade and trillions of dollars in value later, Huang and Altman are perhaps the most significant power players in the tech industry.

In October of last year, Nvidia formalized its financial stake in OpenAI, joining a $6.6 billion funding round that valued the company at $157 billion. A month later, in Tokyo, OpenAI executives met with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to brainstorm what to call their next phase of expansion. Out of that session came “Stargate,” a codename that has since become shorthand for OpenAI’s most ambitious buildout plans.

Stargate now encompasses every major deal for compute capacity, including this week’s partnership with Nvidia. Securing the rights to the name required some careful maneuvering, but OpenAI has embraced it as the banner for its long-term infrastructure strategy.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar: Biggest issue we face is being 'constantly under compute'

The $100 billion commitment from Nvidia represents only part of what’s required for the planned 10-gigawatt buildout. OpenAI will lease Nvidia’s chips for deployment, but financing the broader effort will require other avenues. Executives have called equity the most expensive way to fund data centers, and they say the startup is preparing to take on debt to cover the remainder of the expansion. 

As OpenAI’s compute necessities increase, a big question is where the company will host its workloads, which have to date been largely housed in Microsoft Azure. Taking the work in-house would push OpenAI closer to operating as a first-party cloud provider, a market led by Amazon Web Services, followed by Azure, Google and Oracle.

Executives have openly floated the idea, suggesting it may not be far off. Some even indicated to CNBC that a commercial cloud offering could emerge within a year or two, once OpenAI has secured enough compute to cover its own needs. For now, demand for training frontier models leaves little capacity to spare, but OpenAI isn’t done looking for new opportunities.

As Altman and Huang hammered out details of the arrangement that was announced this week, OpenAI’s infrastructure team was in Tokyo meeting with SoftBank’s Son to discuss broader financing and manufacturing support.

The parallel talks underscored the scale of Altman’s ambition, and the web of global players now involved in bringing it to life.

WATCH: OpenAI restructuring clears hurdle

OpenAI restructuring clears hurdle

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Orsted shares jump 7% after U.S. court overturns Trump project block

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Orsted shares jump 7% after U.S. court overturns Trump project block

Burbo Bank, Liverpool Bay, England, viewed from the sea turbines on Burbo wind farm off the U.K. coast.

Ucg | Universal Images Group | Getty Images

Shares of Danish renewables giant Orsted jumped on Tuesday, after a U.S. judge ruled the embattled firm can resume construction of an offshore wind farm that was halted by the Trump administration.

The decision means Orsted can resume work on the nearly completed Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Shares of the Copenhagen-listed company were among the top performers on the pan-European Stoxx 600 index during morning deals. The stock price, which notched a fresh record low last month, was last seen up around 6.6%.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday granted a preliminary injunction sought by Orsted to overturn the Trump administration’s stop-work order, allowing construction on Revolution Wind to resume while the lawsuit progresses.

Orsted on Monday said it would start work on the project “as soon as possible.”

The company’s shares have tumbled 22.4% this year amid the Trump administration’s more aggressive stance towards renewables.

On Sept. 5, the Danish firm cut its full-year operating profit outlook following lower-than-normal offshore wind speeds during July and August. Orsted also received approval from shareholders for an emergency 60 billion Danish krone ($9.48 billion) rights issue to raise capital. Norwegian energy group Equinor said it would pledge almost $1 billion of fresh capital as part of the fundraising.

Trump block

The court victory represents a significant reprieve for the Danish company, which has been hit hard by U.S. President Donald Trump’s hardline stance on offshore wind projects.

Since his return to the White House earlier this year, Trump has clamped down on the wind power industry. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order suspending new or renewed onshore and offshore wind leases.

The U.S. president, who is championing America’s oil and gas industries, told reporters in January that his administration was “not going to do the wind thing.”

The Department of Transportation last month said it was withdrawing $679 million of funding for a dozen infrastructure projects that support offshore wind development and would instead redirect the money to upgrade existing ports and other infrastructure, where possible.

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Blink + Hubject unlock easier EV charging across North America

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Blink + Hubject unlock easier EV charging across North America

Blink Charging (Nasdaq: BLNK) has struck a deal with Hubject to make charging easier for EV drivers across North America.

The agreement will bring Blink into Hubject’s intercharge eRoaming platform as a charge point operator. That means electric mobility service providers (eMSPs) and their customers in the US, Canada, and Mexico will soon have access to Blink’s charging stations through their existing apps. In turn, Blink drivers will gain better access to stations connected through Hubject’s network.

Hubject, which already connects more than 1 million charging points and 2,750 partners worldwide, expects the integration to strengthen its North American presence by adding Blink’s wide-ranging network of chargers, from Level 2 workplace stations to DC fast charging. Blink, meanwhile, anticipates more customers will plug in, thanks to Hubject’s reach.

“Our collaboration with Blink marks an important step in expanding our North American intercharge network,” said Trishan Peruma, CEO of Hubject North America. “By integrating Blink’s network into our eRoaming platform, we aim to help reduce barriers that have historically complicated EV charging and to support the continued growth of EV adoption across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.”

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Blink Charging’s president and CEO Mike Battaglia added, “Connecting the Blink Network to Hubject’s platform will allow more drivers to benefit from interoperable charging while traveling.”

The integration will use the industry-standard OCPI protocol to keep billing and communication between networks secure and reliable. Deployment is planned in phases throughout 2025, with full integration targeted for the end of the year.

Read more: Blink just made it a lot easier to find its charging stations


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