New Chevy Bolt seen charging at Tesla Supercharger in LA a week before reveal
So far we’ve seen nothing but teaser images of the new Chevy Bolt, but this weekend it was spotted charging at a Tesla Supercharger in Southern California ahead of its October 8 reveal.
The Chevy Bolt was originally released in the 2017 model year. It was GM’s first real, modern effort at an EV, designed to be all-electric rather than a compliance car like the old Chevy Spark EV. (GM did previously design the EV1 from the ground up, but it came along before the lithium ion era of EVs, and was decidedly a compliance car).
It was also a great car. Not only was it a good size unlike the ridiculous land yachts we’re seeing so many of today, it had a phenomenal price, especially near the end of the model’s life. It was good enough to be Electrek’s vehicle of the year for 2022.
But, due to an extended recall and because the Bolt used GM’s first-gen EV platform, rather than its whiz-bang new “Ultium” system, GM retired the vehicle in late 2023, even though it was having its best sales year ever.
But, that wasn’t the end for the model. After declaring the Bolt dead but before ending production on it, GM said that it would bring back an Ultium-based Chevy Bolt (which our publisher Seth Weintraub has taken to calling the “Boltium”).
Unfortunately, the new Bolt will be larger than the old Bolt. The Bolt had two models, the EV and EUV, which were extremely similar except that the EUV was just bigger (and more expensive). Instead of bringing back the spread of both models, GM decided to only bring the larger one, continuing to let the SUV virus spread unchecked through the American populace.
To be fair, the EUV is still not an enormous vehicle, but it is six inches longer than the EV was, and any move towards larger cars is the wrong direction. But that said, we don’t actually know the dimensions of the new Bolt… but we do, now, know what it looks like.
Chevy Bolt spotted charging at Tesla Supercharger with NACS port
And it turns out, it looks almost exactly like the old one. At least from the outside.
It was spotted charging at a Tesla Supercharger in Southern California (which I don’t recognize, but which I’m sure our readers will be able to point out) by EV Youtuber chargepozitive, who posted his photos on Instagram.
The exterior design of the Bolt looks pretty much identical to the outgoing EUV model. The only differences we can see are the removal of the black border around the fake grille, addition of a black line between the headlights, a change in the taillights to add a slight angular dip around the edges, and more body color paint on the rear bumper.
We can’t tell what the size of the vehicle is, but it’s likely similar if not identical to the outgoing EUV, given how similar the models look.
And while chargepozitive said he could peek through the windows to see inside, the dash was covered up and the GM employee who was there with the car asked him not to take pictures.
What’s more interesting is what it’s plugged into – a Tesla Supercharger, via a NACS port.
Like the entire rest of the industry, GM committed to adding NACS to its EVs, and it looks like we’re finally seeing the end results of that.
While adapters have been available and even the old Bolt has been able to charge on Tesla Superchargers for some time now, GM has not yet released an EV with a native NACS port. Its first native NACS car is scheduled to be the 2026 Cadillac Optiq, but more are coming, including the new Bolt.
The charger the Bolt was spotted at has the new V4-style cabinets, which notably have a longer cable. This seems to matter, because the Chevy Bolt has its charge port in front of the driver’s door – the same place the original model had it.
While this is good for GM’s design and engineering process, and for consistency for current Bolt owners, it could lead to a few snags… particularly when it comes to Supercharger use.
Since Tesla put the charge port for its vehicles in a weird spot (because that’s where the plug was in the garage of the house Elon Musk was renting at the time), that means all Superchargers are configured so the cable can reach the left-rear of the vehicle. And some early Superchargers have short cables, which really can’t reach more than a couple feet.
So, that means a port at the left-front of the vehicle isn’t going to be reachable on those short-cable chargers. Tesla even has an entry about this on its NACS FAQ page, stating:
Most Supercharger cables at NACS Supercharger sites should be able to reach your EV charge port, however, in some cases you might have to park over the line in order to charge comfortably. Avoid parking diagonally to reach the cable and try to obstruct as few charge posts as possible. Charge port locations vary by EV model, which requires cable sharing between adjacent stalls at many sites. Tesla is rapidly deploying our latest V4 Supercharger post which reaches all EVs in the same Supercharger stall. Additionally, we encourage all vehicle manufacturers to standardize charge port locations to the rear driver side or front passenger side.
Notably, the new Bolt’s charging location is not in either of those two quadrants of the vehicle, and is even set back from the nose, which will add difficulty at all but the latest Tesla sites (though it should be said that even the Cybertruck is barely compatible with some Supercharger sites).
This is just an early showing in a few photos, and frankly doesn’t tell us a lot that we didn’t already find when GM sent out some teaser images in July showing the new front fascia and charge port placement.
But we’ll get a closer look at the Bolt next week at an unveiling event in Los Angeles. So stay tuned for more details.
What do you think about the new Bolt’s design, now that we’ve seen it all-in-one rather than through teaser images? Let us know in the comments.
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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
The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
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