So much for ‘all-electric’ – Fiat 500e may come with a gas engine
Stellantis-owned Fiat has had high hopes for its all-electric Fiat 500, available in the US, but now a report says that the company may backtrack due to low demand and add an ICE version to the lineup.
Earlier this month, Fiat reportedly asked suppliers for quotes to bump up production of the 500e at Stellantis’s Miafiori factory in Turin, Italy, to 175,000 units a year from the 77,260 that were made last year, reports Automotive News Europe.
Turns out, of that total, 100,000 units would be ICE models, but all this was supposed to be very hush-hush since Fiat hasn’t formally decided on the move. News of the switch was first reported by Il Corriere della Sera and then confirmed by Automotive News Europe.
This is strange, unexpected news, because it’s unusual to convert an EV to a gas engine, and the company already sells an ICE 500, built in Poland and a slightly smaller car that predates the 500e by more than a decade. And the 500e was expected to help push the company toward its emissions goals. Fiat has set the target of being an electric-only brand by 2030.
The argument is that adding in a gas model of the 500e to Mirafiori could smooth over union concerns about “declining volumes of the 500e” and help the company meet Italy’s goal of maintaining the country’s auto production at no fewer than 1 million cars per year, with Stellantis bearing the brunt of that demand being the only volume manufacturer in Italy. Fiat has already cut one of two shifts at Mirafiori last month due to slow sales, laying off some 2,250 workers, with more than half of those affected working on the 500e.
Of course, Fiat’s home turf of Italy has some of the lowest EV adoption rates in Europe, at just 4% of the market. But the far-right Italian government is working to change that, by weighing a plan to invest €930 million ($1 billion) into some enticing financial incentives to nudge drivers toward electric cars. But this hasn’t happened yet, and some Italian shoppers may be waiting for those incentives to be put into action before making the switch – so the automaker enjoys so no home court advantage here.
According to the report, we could see a mild-hybrid 500e – which would be powered by the same 1-liter, 70 hp FireFly gas engine used in Fiat’s Panda minicar, as soon as late 2025 or early 2026.
While Fiat was set to cut production of its current ICE 500 in Poland at the end of next month, that model would move to Fiat’s new Algerian factory, which has a capacity of 90,000 units a year. The model, which would not be compliant with European homologation rules, will be sold in the Middle East and Africa only, reports Automotive News Europe.
If the project is approved, it could take about 18 to 24 months to build the 500e to accept a gasoline engine. The outgoing ICE model currently starts at €17,700 in Italy, with the 500e starting at €29,950, so an ICE version of the 500e is expected to fill that gap.
Fiat is one of the most popular European brands, but Stellantis has had its work cut out for it with the recent launch of the Fiat 500e in the US, Stellantis’s first all-electric vehicle in the US market. The price tag starts at $32,500 plus a $1,595 destination fee, with not much of a solid reputation to back that up for Americans. The car is designed too for the upmarket, trendy urban driver who doesn’t mind the 149-mile range on that price. But of course, Fiat sold practically no cars in the US – a grand total of 605 cars. It sold so few cars in the US that it is now discontinuing the few models it had on offer and going on all in on the 500e.
Photos: Fiat’s new 2024 500e (Source: Stellantis)
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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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