Electra eSTOL aircraft needs just 100 feet to take off, gets $9 billion in orders
Electra first showed off its zero emission eSTOL (electric Short Take Off and Landing) aircraft concept back in 2021. After a proof-of-concept prototype that exceeded nearly every initial promise, the company seems to have a surprise, $9 billion hit on its hands!
Electra claims it was founded to provide affordable air travel without airports, emissions, or noise. The goal was to build an aircraft that could deliver on the promises of eVTOL aircraft but at significantly reduced cost. The more familiar shape and ability to use a number of commercially available components helped to address the cost aspect of that equation. And, after two years of development and rigorous ground testing, Electra’s first piloted technology demonstrator aircraft, the Goldfinch EL-2, took to the skies in late 2023.
The EL-2 proved that the electric drive Electra concept could, in fact, quietly take off from “airstrips” just 100 feet long, and do so with a fraction of the noise of a similar, conventional ICE-powered aircraft – and a fraction of the cost of a modern eVTOL.
$uccessful test flight
After the success of its first prototype, Electra scored a raft of orders, culminating in the company’s 2000th aircraft pre-order in February of 2024, following agreements with JSX, Surf Air, JetSetGo, Charm Aviation, and LYGG.
Since then? Despite the company being relatively quiet, press-wise, the orders have continued to roll in – and the aviation startup is reportedly now sitting on more than $9 billion (US) in pre-orders, outselling anything else in the eVTOL world.
The production version of the Electra will be powered by eight electric propellers placed along the leading edge of the wing, which has large flaps hanging from the trailing edges to create a “blown lift” aerodynamic effect. Think of it like a Formula 1 Formula E ground effects package with the reverse goal, in that it works the same way but pushes the vehicle up instead of pulling it down. On the Electra, the blown lift effect is projected to be powerful enough to lift the aircraft at speeds of just 35 knots (about 40 mph).
Blown lift explainer
By blowing air over the wing and large flaps with an array of electric motors, our Ultra Short aircraft multiplies the amount of lift the wing makes at very slow speeds. With this technique, we can take off and land at speeds as slow as 35 knots, which only takes a few vehicle lengths to achieve. The key is in the accelerated airflow forming a thick jet sheet coming off of the trailing edge of the wing, making the wing act virtually larger than it physically is. In climb and cruise, we reduce blowing and stow the flaps for ultra-efficient operations.
The production plane (as well as the concept) use a compact turbine generator to send power to a small-ish onboard battery pack, which then sends electricity to each of the 8 prop motors. Electra says its turbogenerator supports up to 100% sustainable aviation fuels today, and can be modified to burn bio- or synthetic-fuels with minimal engineering lift.
The final version will be able operate from airfields as small as 300 x 100 ft (90 x 30 m), or about one-tenth the length of a standard airport runway. That means that, even if these eSTOL aircraft don’t open up quite as many spaces for air travel as eVTOLs, do, they’ll still be extremely flexible – and more than capable of operating from the roofs of many existing buildings and parking structures.
USAF Electra eSTOL concept
And, of course, the Air Force wants one.
SOURCES | IMAGES: Electra; via Avionics Int’l, New Atlas.
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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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