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Still think that buying a new car is always much cheaper than leasing if you’re playing for keeps? Not true, particularly when it comes to electric vehicles. We found that current factory lease offers on 22 different EV models dispel that myth with terms that pass the entire commercial clean vehicle Federal tax credit to the lessee, enabling the lessee to eventually own the vehicle for thousands of dollars less than paying cash upfront or taking out a loan.

1. 2024 VinFast VF8 Eco

Cash: $51,448; Lease-to-own: $34,063. Lease-to-own savings: $17,385

With an average monthly cost of just $218/month, the 36-month, zero-down, $199/month lease deal on the Vinfast VF8 Eco tops our list of factory lease offers for September and is currently by far the cheapest EV lease in the nation, made possible by a total of $18,500 in lease incentives. According to the Vinfast website, the lease comes with an option to purchase the vehicle at $21,712 after its three-year term is up. Adding 36 payments of $199 to the $21,712 residual, plus the $695 acquisition fee due at signing and $350 fee to exercise the purchase option (which is unusual – Vinfast and Nissan are the only ones I’ve seen that charge for this) adds up to $29,921. Assuming a 9% state tax rate on all payments as well as on the $18,500 lease incentive results in a total after-tax lease-to-own cost of $34,063. That’s over $17K less than the after-tax cost of buying the $47,200 SUV outright.

VinFast-EV-deliveries-Q4
VinFast VF 8 (Source: VinFast)

Capable of sprinting from zero to 60mph in five seconds, the VF8 can carry five passengers along with a conservatively measured 13.2 cubic feet of cargo behind the rear seats for up to 264 miles on a full charge. Find a Vinfast VF8 in your area.

2. 2024 Subaru Solterra Limited

Cash: $54,195; Lease-to-own: $37,801. Lease-to-own savings: $16,394

Subaru is now advertising a three-year, zero-down, $379/month lease on the 2024 Solterra in very-well-equipped Limited trim, which is $50/month more than the basic (albeit well-appointed) Premium trim that Subaru has been offering at $329/month since early spring. That extra fifty bucks a month buys additional safety features and amenities such as a 360-degree camera system, parking assistance, 20-inch rims and tires, LED fog lights, power folding mirrors, power front seats, a heated steering wheel, heated rear seats, digital key, power tailgate, wireless phone charger, Harmon Kardon audio, and a huge 12.3-inch center display that replaces the Premium’s 7-inch display along with its annoyingly thick bezel.   

According to Subaru’s website, the Solterra Limited lease comes with an option to buy for $20,385 (a 42% residual value) after making 36 monthly payments of $379, resulting in an after-tax lease-to-own cost of just $38,342, assuming a 9% state tax rate. That’s over sixteen grand six grand less than either paying cash up front or taking advantage of Subaru’s 72-month 0% financing offer, both costing $54,195 after adding a 9% tax on its $49,720 MSRP.

Subaru-three-row-electric-SUV
Subaru Solterra (Source: Subaru)

Visually, the Solterra bears an uncanny resemblance to the Toyota bZ4X, as the two are built on the same dedicated modular EV platform and share quite a bit of sheet metal. Currently available only in all-wheel-drive, the Subaru carries 29 cubic feet of cargo behind its rear seats, accelerates from standstill to 60mph in 6.5 seconds, and travels up to 222 miles on a full charge in Limited trim. 

Folks that can live without the bells and whistles of the Limited trim might opt for the $46,340 Solterra Premium, which ekes out another 6 miles from a full charge for a total of 228 miles, thanks to rolling on a lighter 18-inch wheel and tire setup. The end-of-term buyout on its 3-year, $329/month lease is $20,390, yielding a tax-included lease-to-own cost of $35,840, which is $14,671 less than a cash-up-front after-tax cost of $50,511.  

Despite offering enticing factory lease terms on the 2024 Solterra for most of the year, Subaru dealers in some areas are advertising deep discounts on the 2024 Solterra, many of them at $7K or more, to attract customers. Any discount from MSRP will drive a vehicle’s lease-to-own cost even lower, perhaps in this case to an after-tax outlay that may approach $30K. Check for Subaru Solterra deals near you.

3. 2024 Toyota bZ4X XLE AWD (NY/NJ/CT)

Cash: $49,067; Lease-to-own: $33,701. Lease-to-own savings: $15,366.

In New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, an all-wheel-drive 2024 Toyota bZ4X XLE (MSRP $47,309) can be leased at $219/month for 36 months, $3999 due at signing, with the option to buy for $17,977 at the end of the lease. These attractive terms are due in large part to a $16,250 lease incentive that significantly reduces the capitalized cost of this five-seat SUV with a 228-mile range, zero to sixty time of 6.5 seconds, and 29 cubic feet of cargo space behind the rear seats.

During the three-year lease term, tallying up the $3999 plus 35 payments of $219 (the first month is paid for at signing) adds up to $23,464. After an assumed 9% tax rate on the up-front capitalized cost reduction, down, and first payment ($1732) as well as on each subsequent payment ($20/month), the total cost to lease the bZ4X is $14,106.

At the end of the lease term, buying the three-year-old bZ4X at its incredibly low 38% residual value will cost $17,977 plus $1618 tax for a total of $19,595. All-in, the lease-to-own cost adds up to just $33,701.

In comparison, paying cash up front at delivery or opting for Toyota Financials’ 0% APR loan instead of the lease will cost a whole lot more, even with a current $2500 purchase incentive: $47,309 MSRP plus $4,258 tax minus the $2500 incentive equals $49,067. That’s a whopping $15,366 more than taking the lease-to-own route!

Toyota-EV-production-suppliers
2024 Toyota bZ4X (Source: Toyota)

In California, Toyota is featuring a cheaper bZ4X XLE lease, but the terms apply to a $45,699 front-drive model in XLE trim that can travel up to 252 miles on a full charge. At $219/month for 36 months, $2999 due at signing, and an option to buy for $17,823 after three years, the tax-included lease-to-own cost is $33,149, which is $14,671 cheaper than a $47,312 tax-included cash purchase at MSRP.

The bZ4x has been selling quite well this year, thanks to Toyota clearing out dealer lots last April in a matter of weeks by dropping the average monthly lease costs of 2023 and 2024 bZ4X XLE models down to bottom-testing $191/month and $227/month respectively. By May, dealers were taking reservations for allocated and in-transit vehicles, some of them charging a premium over MSRP. Toyota has been gradually ratcheting up lease prices in the months that followed, and at a current effective lease cost of $323/month, supply and demand seems to be balancing out as the number of bZ4X sitting on dealer lots slowly increases. Although most dealers are still asking for MSRP or more, we did find a handful of dealers offering bZ4X discounts between $1000 and $2000.  Let us help you find a good deal on a Toyota bZ4X in your area.  

4. 2024 Lexus RZ450e Premium

Cash: $53,731; Lease-to-own: $42,370. Lease-to-own savings: $11,361

Lexus currently has a lease offer on its $56,175 RZ450e Premium that includes an $18,500 incentive, resulting in an incredible $429/month for 27 months, $1999 due at signing. The option to buy at lease end with a residual value of 43% (per data from the Leasehackr.com “Rate Findr” tool) is $24,155. Summing the $1999 with 26 subsequent payments of $429 plus the $24,155 buyout, then applying an assumed 9% tax rate calculates to a tax-included lease-to-own cost of $42,370. Built on the same EV platform as the aforementioned Subaru Solterra and Toyota bZ4X, the RZ distinguishes itself from its two siblings with a more upscale look and feel inside and out. The five-seat all-wheel-drive luxury SUV capable of 220 miles on a full charge is slightly longer and wider, which accommodates a more spacious passenger volume and larger 34.9 cubic foot cargo hold behind the rear seats. It’s also much faster than the bZ4X and Solterra, blasting from zero to 60mph in 4.6 seconds.

Lexus-Toyota's-EV-plans
2024 Lexus RZ 450e Premium in Iridium (Source: Lexus)

Need to spend less as well as go further between charging sessions? The front-wheel-drive RZ300e (MSRP $51,475) has a lease offer of $399/month with $1999 at signing and a lease-end buyout of $22,134, which works out to an after-tax lease-to-own cost of $39,134, over $3K less than the RZ450e and just $1333 more than the Solterra Limited. Capable of 0-60mph runs of about seven seconds and going 266 miles on a full charge, the RZ300e sacrifices the RZ450e’s muscle car straight-line performance in favor of 46 more miles of range.

The RZ seems to be selling briskly, thanks to huge lease incentives and a bit of dealer participation, with dealer discounts from MSRP ranging from $500 to $3,326. Look for a great deal on a new Lexus RZ300e or RZ450e near you.

5. 2024 Volvo C40 Core RWD

Cash: $59,836; Lease-to-own: $52,360. Lease-to-own savings: $7,476

Volvo currently has a lease offer on a rear-wheel-drive C40 in Core trim that is $459/month for 36 months and $3949 due at signing. According to lease calculators on Leasehackr.com and Edmunds.com, the residual on a 3-year, 10K mi/year lease is 50%, which calculates to an option to buy for $27,448 at lease end, resulting in a lease-to-own deal that’s over $7K less than an all-cash transaction at a 9% tax rate.

Volvo-C40-XC-40-EVs-4
The C40 Recharge / Source: Volvo Cars

This four-door five-seater with 15 cubic feet of cargo space aft of its rear seats goes from zero to 60mph in 6.9 seconds and runs for 297 miles on a full charge in rear-drive configuration. Those yearning for more performance can opt for the all-wheel-drive twin-motor configuration that rockets from standstill to 60mph in 4.5 seconds and travels 257 miles on a full charge. The C40 in either form may seem a bit pricey compared to its competition, but a number of Volvo dealers are offering hefty C40 discounts to compensate. Find a great deal on a Volvo C40 in your area.

6. 2024 Nissan Ariya Engage FWD

Cash: $45,251; Lease-to-own: $39,023. Lease-to-own savings: $6,228

Nissan is currently running a $10,000 incentive on the 2024 Ariya, which translates into some of the most alluring lease terms since its introduction last year. In its most basic form, which is the Ariya Engage in front-drive, standard battery configuration with an MSRP of $45,515, leases at $289 per month for 24 months and $4119 at signing. Leasehackr.com and Edmunds.com lease calculators show a 56% residual on a two-year, 10K mi/year lease, which when multiplied by the MSRP, calculates to an option to buy for $23,548 at lease end after adding a $300 fee that Nissan charges to exercise that option. With an assumed 9% tax rate, its lease to-own cost comes out to $39,203, which is over $6K less than a tax-included all-cash purchase of this five-passenger SUV that carries 22.8 cubic feet of cargo behind its second-row seats, goes 216 miles on a charge, and accelerates from standstill to 60mph in 7.5 seconds.

Nissan-Ariya-electric-SUV
2023 Nissan Ariya electric crossover SUV (source: Nissan)

Those that have more of a need for speed, range, and amenities might want to consider a $56,565 Ariya Platinum+ e-4ORCE, which is a decked-out all-wheel-drive Ariya equipped with a larger battery that hustles from zero to 60mph in five seconds flat and travels up to 257 miles on a full charge. At $419/month for 24 months, $4249 at signing, and an option to buy at $34,239 at lease end, its after-tax lease-to-own cost is $58,874. That’s a $2,781 savings from a tax-included all-cash purchase, but it seems a bit expensive at almost $20K more than the lease-to-own cost of the base model. However, there are a number of dealers offering incredible Ariya lease terms that makes the well-equipped Ariya worth considering. Get a great Nissan Ariya offer at a dealership near you.

… and the rest

Below is a list of EVs included in this study, sorted from highest to lowest lease-to-own (LTO) savings. Here are a few random thoughts/observations after staring at the list for too long:

  • The cheapest EV we evaluated – the 2025 Nissan LEAF S (MSRP $29,815) – is even cheaper in the lease-to-own scenario, with an after-tax lease-to-own cost of $27,880. That’s $3218 less than the after-tax cost of an outright purchase at MSRP, assuming a 9% tax rate.
  • Those that have been cross-shopping GM Ultium platform siblings probably know that the MSRP of a Chevrolet Blazer EV AWD LT is $1600 cheaper than that of a Honda Prologue AWD EX. However, leasing to own the Prologue should result in a nearly $5000 after-tax savings over a cash sale, making the lease-to-own Prologue cheaper than a Blazer EV cash purchase by over $3000. But what about leasing the Blazer EV? By our calculation, the two-year Blazer EV lease featured on Chevy’s website results in an after-tax lease-to-own cost that’s $1146 more than a cash purchase, due in part to a high residual (65%, according to Edmunds.com), thereby making the Prologue an even more attractive choice from a cost perspective.
  • At the bottom of the list are eight EV models with lease-to-own costs that are greater than a cash purchase. So is it a bad idea to lease these EVs if you’re playing for keeps? Not necessarily, if your plan is to actually finance the purchase. For six of those eight EVs, the lease-to-own strategy should cost less than taking out a loan with the same drive-off amount as the lease it’s being compared to. Two outliers, the Cadillac Lyriq and Ford F-150 Lightning, were the only EVs on the list that should be cheaper to finance rather than lease-to-own, specifically for buyers that qualify for the $7500 Federal EV tax credit. Why? Well, for the $62K Caddy, a ridiculously inflated residual on its two-year,10K mi/year term (80%, per Edmunds.com) makes it cost-prohibitive to buy out the Lyriq lease. As for the F-150 Lightning, taking advantage of Ford’s financing incentives (1.9% rate and $2000 cash back on 2024 models, or 0% interest rate and $2750 cash back on 2023 models) result in a lower cost-to-own than employing the lease-to-own strategy using the current factory lease terms.
Year/Make/Model/Trim Cash LTO LTO
Savings
%
2024 Vinfast VF8 Eco $51,448 $34,063 $17,385 34%
2024 Subaru Solterra Ltd $54,195 $37,801 $16,394 30%
2024 Toyota bZ4X XLE AWD $49,067 $33,701 $15,366 31%
2024 Subaru Solterra Premium $50,511 $35,840 $14,671 29%
2024 Toyota bZ4X XLE FWD $47,312 $33,149 $14,163 30%
2024 Lexus RZ450e Premium $53,731 $42,370 $11,361 21%
2024 Lexus RZ300e Premium $48,608 $39,134 $9,474 19%
2024 Volvo C40 Core RWD $59,836 $52,360 $7,476 12%
2024 Nissan Ariya Engage FWD $45,251 $39,023 $6,228 14%
2024 Honda Prologue AWD EX $48,957 $44,013 $4,943 10%
2024 Kia EV6 LLR RWD $44,084 $39,524 $4,560 10%
2025 Genesis Electrified GV70 $73,447 $69,088 $4,359 6%
2024 Volvo XC40 Core RWD $58,582 $54,446 $4,136 7%
2025 Nissan LEAF S $31,098 $27,880 $3,218 10%
2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 SEL RWD $45,687 $42,753 $2,933 6%
2024 Fiat 500e $37,164 $34,284 $2,880 8%
2024 Nissan Ariya Plat+ AWD $61,656 $58,874 $2,781 5%
2024 Acura ZDX $64,277 $62,405 $1,872 3%
2024 Kia Niro EV Wind $38,054 $36,214 $1,840 5%
2024 Ford Mach-E Prem RWD $45,629 $43,992 $1,637 4%
2024 MB EQB 300 4MATIC $56,518 $55,354 $1,163 2%
2024 Kia EV9 LLR RWD $58,658 $58,079 $579 1%
2025 Mini Countryman SE ALL4 $49,573 $49,064 $509 1%
2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV LT $38,192 $37,765 $427 1%
2024 MB EQE 350 4MATIC SUV $75,702 $75,503 $199 0%
2024 BMW iX xDrive50 $87,248 $87,061 $187 0%
2024 Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE RWD $40,024 $40,808 -$784 -2%
2024 Genesis GV60 Std RWD $50,652 $51,570 -$919 -2%
2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV AWD LT $47,213 $48,359 -$1,146 -2%
2024 Audi Q4 e-tron 55 Prem + $58,786 $60,063 -$1,277 -2%
2023 Ford Lightning Lariat $68,219 $71,590 -$3,371 -5%
2024 BMW i4 eDrive35 $52,111 $55,586 -$3,475 -7%
2024 Audi Q8 e-tron Prem + $76,596 $81,794 -$5,199 -7%
2024 Ford F-150 Lightning Flash $66,898 $73,559 -$6,661 -10%
2023 Ford F-150 Lightning XLT $51,869 $58,941 -$7,072 -14%
2024 Cadillac Lyriq RWD Tech $57,678 $68,143 -$10,465 -18%
2024 Ford F-150 Lightning XLT $61,448 $73,269 -$11,821 -19%
EV Lease-to-own (LTO) savings over cash purchase, assuming a 9% tax rate

One final note: Although some manufacturer lease offers conveniently state a residual value, most ads don’t make mention of it or contain weasel words like “Option to purchase at lease end for an amount to be determined at lease signing.” In any case, if you’re playing for keeps, ask for the residual value during negotiations to set expectations and verify that it’s not inflated, then check what’s written in the contract before signing on the bottom line.

As always, check our Electric Vehicle Price Guide and Electric Vehicle Lease Guide for the best deals on EVs in the US.

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Rivian Adventure Network open to other cars soon, will be ‘awesome’ says CEO

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Rivian Adventure Network open to other cars soon, will be 'awesome' says CEO

We heard a little more about Rivian’s upcoming plans to open its Rivian Adventure Network chargers at a roundtable discussion with CEO RJ Scaringe this week.

Rivian has been working on its own in-house charging network since 2020, with a focus of placing charging sites on the way to the sort of beautiful natural places that it has tied so much of its brand to.

For a primary example of this, Rivian opened its first “Charging Outpost” just outside Yosemite National Park in July, renovating an old gas station into a very cool ranger cabin-style spot to stop and refuel your car – and also yourself.

Now, it’s ready to open its network to other brands, which it announced last April. The goal was to open by the end of 2024 – which is fast approaching.

While Rivian stopped short of announcing a date for this at our roundtable discussion, it was clear that the announcement is coming “very soon.”

Scaringe told us that he was just reviewing the software that non-Rivian customers will use and that “it’s gonna be awesome.” So it sounds like there’s a plan to offer a separate app experience for non-Rivian owners, likely through the Rivian app (thus ballooning the number of apps that every EV owner needs to have… we need to do something about that).

To this end, Rivian did purchase A Better Route Planner (ABRP) last June, one of the more popular charge planning apps for EVs. This has surely been a factor in Rivian’s app development.

Scaringe told us that RAN has now expanded to a total of 91 sites and around 700 chargers – which he says is around 4% of the size of Tesla’s Supercharger network, but that RAN has maintained high uptime as it scales. Scaringe said that if you would have asked him 6-7 years ago, he would have expected more successful third-party charging companies by now., but that now, out of all the charging networks out there, there are “only two great networks – and only one great scaled network,” namely Tesla Superchargers.

The others, which aren’t owned by an EV manufacturer, just aren’t as good. RAN and Tesla have ~99% uptime, where Scaringe said that other networks have sub-70% or even sub-50% uptime (this may be an underestimate – or maybe not – but the point stands that every EV driver can tell you Tesla is the gold standard here).

So Rivian sees it as important to electrification to offer another great network that can help give drivers more choices, more availability, and high reliability.

But how will that interface with the NACS transition? Rivian was early to hop aboard and announce that it will shift to using NACS and ship adapters to its owners, though its current vehicles still have native CCS ports even post-refresh (the Korean brands will be the first to offer native NACS ports on their vehicles).

We were quite interested in the timeline of who started the discussions to shift to NACS, and Scaringe told us that it was pretty much universal across the industry that as soon as Tesla released its NACS whitepaper calling it an open standard, car companies started talking amongst themselves about the potential of finally harmonizing on a single charging standard.

As of now, Rivian is still installing CCS cables, not NACS ones. It sounded like it intends to keep doing this for the foreseeable future, and that “the charging network will catch up” as cars transition to NACS. Until then, people can use adapters – and “in the long term, everything will go to NACS” as it’s just a better standard, and whatever remaining CCS cars exist will just end up using adapters.

This seems a little strange to make cars that aren’t (natively) supported on your own charging network, but Scaringe said that that’s the benefit of owning the network – cables are not too hard to swap out. So it would be easy to just change out the cable heads on existing chargers without having to build new sites or install new cabinets.

We asked whether they’d try a dual-charging-head strategy, with NACS and CCS heads on each cabinet, but it didn’t sound like that was in the plans. The cables will, at least, be long enough to reach both sides of the vehicle – an important consideration given the lack of standardization of charging port locations on EVs, as networks start opening up to multiple brands.

So – we’re looking forward to hearing more about Rivian’s efforts to open RAN, which ought to bear fruit quite soon, if the “end of the year” schedule holds. Stay tuned, as we’re sure there’s more news to come soon.


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How tech bros bought ‘America’s most pro-crypto Congress ever’

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How tech bros bought 'America's most pro-crypto Congress ever'

Bernie Moreno, Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, attends a campaign event in Holland, Ohio, on Saturday, October 26, 2024. Moreno is running against Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. 

Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

Prior to announcing his Senate candidacy in April 2023, Bernie Moreno was a political no name. A former car salesman in the Cleveland area, his only prior experience in politics was a losing bid for Ohio’s other Senate seat in 2022.

Moreno has since accomplished the once unthinkable. 

On Nov. 5, as part of the election that swept Donald Trump back into the White House, Moreno defeated Democratic incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown, who was first elected to the House in 1992, before winning his Senate seat in 2006 and chairing the powerful Banking Committee since 2021.

Moreno’s rise from unsung Ohio businessman to prominent political leader was no accident. His campaign was backed by $40 million from the cryptocurrency industry as part of a highly targeted effort to get friendly candidates elected and, perhaps more importantly, its critics removed. Moreno’s victory was one of the Senate seats Republicans flipped to take control of the chamber.  

In total, crypto-related PACs and other groups tied to the industry reeled in over $245 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. Crypto accounted for nearly half of all corporate dollars that flowed into the election, according to nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen. Advocacy group Stand With Crypto Alliance, which Coinbase launched last year, developed a grading system for House and Senate races across the country as a way to help determine where money should be spent.

Crypto execs, investors and evangelists saw the election as existential to an industry that spent the past four years simultaneously trying to grow up while being repeatedly beaten down. Nearly 300 pro-crypto lawmakers will take seats in the House and Senate, according to Stand With Crypto, giving the sector unprecedented influence over the legislative agenda.

The crypto political lobby worked so well this cycle because it made something complicated, like campaign finance, simple: Raise a ton of cash from a handful of donors and buy ad space in battleground states to either support candidates who back crypto or smear the candidates who don’t. It also required thinking of candidates as a bit of a binary: They were either with the industry or against it.

Crypto companies and their executives mobilized rapidly, and they successfully figured out how to deploy their cash through a sophisticated ad machine across the country. They also took cues from what big tech got wrong. Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying legislators post-election, the crypto industry invested in targeting their opponents ahead of the election so they wouldn’t have to deal with them at all the next few years.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong: We finally have a chance to get some regulatory clarity in the U.S.

For over a year, Moreno was grilled by Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and David Sacks about blockchain technology, digital asset policy and the shifting terrain of global finance.

“They didn’t just jump in head first,” Moreno said, describing the scores of meetings that stretched back to his run in the primary. “We had to build a lot of trust.”

Moreno also met with Coinbase co-founders Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam as well as policy chief Faryar Shirzad. Armstrong and Ehrsam did not respond to CNBC’s request, through Coinbase, for comment about the meetings.

Coinbase is the largest digital asset exchange in the U.S. and has been battling the Securities and Exchange Commission in court for over a year. The company was the crypto kingmaker in the 2024 cycle, giving more than $75 million to a super PAC called Fairshake. It was one of the top spending committees of any industry this cycle and exclusively gave to pro-crypto candidates running for Congress. Fairshake’s candidates won virtually every race that it funded in the general election.

“Being anti-crypto is simply bad politics,” Coinbase’s Armstrong wrote on X following Moreno’s victory. 

As the price of bitcoin has multiplied by about sixfold in the past four years, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has taken major crypto players like Coinbase and Ripple to court for allegedly selling unregistered securities and has avoided working with companies to develop new specialized regulations.

Meanwhile, Sen. Brown sided with the expressly anti-crypto Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in targeting crypto for allegedly funding terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Brown became more vocal in calling for crackdowns of the industry after the failure of crypto exchange FTX in late 2022. 

As FTX was spiraling into bankruptcy, Brown on Nov. 10 retweeted a post from the Senate Banking Committee calling the event “a loud warning bell that cryptocurrencies can fail” and can “have a ripple effect on consumers and other parts of our financial system.”

The bipartisan Fairshake won all but three races in the general election, spending big on Republicans and Democrats gunning for key seats. Protect Progress, a PAC affiliated with Fairshake, gave more than $10 million apiece to Democratic candidates for the Senate in Arizona and Michigan. Both won. Defend American Jobs, another one of Fairshake’s affiliated PACs, spent more than $3 million to support Republican Jim Justice in West Virginia, who will take the former seat of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin when the new session gets underway in 2025.

In California, Democratic Rep. Katie Porter lost a Senate primary after Fairshake spent more than $10 million on ads against her. 

“I was, like, ‘What the heck is Fairshake?'” Porter told The New Yorker.

Trump trade boosts crypto

How tech bros made their pick

Those vetting Moreno wanted to understand what he would do differently than the current administration and regulatory regime, the senator-elect told CNBC in an interview.

“These are people who know how to vet investments, know how to vet people and they took that same discipline” with me, Moreno said.

It helped that he’d built a blockchain startup, a company called Champ Titles that digitizes automobile ticketing and registration.

“What they didn’t want was to put time, effort and energy behind somebody who, at the end, would be a disappointment,” Moreno said.

A spokesperson for Andreessen and Horowitz, who are co-founders of a venture firm bearing their names, declined to comment. Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures, didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for an interview.

Coinbase’s Shirzad met Moreno over breakfast in Washington in the spring. Moreno wasn’t an expert on the details of the policy issues he’d be pursuing but had a clear understanding of crypto technology and how it could be applied, Shirzad told CNBC in an interview. 

“It was a really great meeting of minds between me as a policy guy and him as kind of a business guy that saw the potential of the technology,” Shirzad said. 

Moreno was out of cash after spending all he had on a tough and expensive primary, said David McIntosh, an early backer of Moreno’s Senate bid and president of the Club for Growth, a conservative organization that focuses on American economic issues. Fairshake played a crucial role for Moreno’s campaign starting in the summer, McIntosh said. 

Moreno’s victory over Brown “sent a really strong signal to Washington that the voters are going to support candidates who are pro-blockchain,” McIntosh said.

McIntosh noted that the Club for Growth spent $6.5 million to help Moreno with advertising in the primary through its different super PACs, including the Bitcoin Freedom Fund.

Brown’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Brown told Politico he hasn’t ruled out running for Vice President-elect JD Vance’s open Senate seat in Ohio, which will be filled by special election in 2026.

Moreno benefited from branding himself as the “change” candidate while Brown “became a defender of the status quo,” Shirzad said.

“Crypto thematically is a change issue,” Shirzad said. “It appeals to not only a younger demographic, but it also appeals to voters who want to change.”

Fairshake declined to comment on whether it would spend to block another Brown Senate run, but the super PAC has already raised $78 million for the 2026 midterms.

“We stuck to our core strategy from Day 1, supported pro-crypto candidates and opposed those who played politics with jobs and innovation, and won,” Fairshake told CNBC in a statement.

How crypto and fintech may perform under the second Trump administration

‘Most pro-crypto Congress ever’

The past two election cycles featured spending from the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for stealing more than $8 billion worth of customer money through FTX. 

This year’s contributor list was more robust but saw large sums of funding come from companies that have been at odds with SEC Chair Gensler for years. That includes Coinbase and blockchain giant Ripple Labs. Prominent venture fund Andreessen Horowitz, which has a large portfolio of crypto companies, was one of the other primary contributors.

A lot of crypto’s big names also gave significantly in 2024. 

FEC filings show Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were among the largest individual crypto donors this election cycle, giving a combined $10.1 million. Top executives from Ripple contributed millions, led by billionaire founder Chris Larsen, who gave around $12 million this cycle.

Coinbase CEO Armstrong gave over $1.3 million to a mix of PACs including Fairshake and JD Vance for Senate Inc. He also gave directly to Democrats and Republicans running for House and Senate seats. Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal attended at least two Trump fundraisers, including one in Nashville, Tennessee, on the sidelines of the biggest bitcoin event of the year.

Kraken Chairman Jesse Powell donated over $1 million to the Trump campaign.

Other individual crypto contributors include ex-Bitfinex strategy chief Phil Potter (over $1.6 million), Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani ($878,600), Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam ($735,400), Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson ($1,4 million), Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla ($198,500), BitGo CEO Mike Belshe ($119,825), Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko ($67,100), and Xapo Bank founder Wences Casares ($374,899).

This week, Armstrong reportedly met with the president-elect to discuss appointments. Within a day, conversations swirled about the potential for the White House’s first crypto czar. By the end of the week, SEC Chair and longtime crypto foe Gensler, whose term doesn’t expire until June 2026, announced he was retiring on inauguration day.

One of Trump’s promises to his crypto fans on the campaign was that he would fire the SEC head and choose crypto-friendly regulators if elected. Gensler may have taken a look at the pressure that faces him across Washington and decided it just wasn’t worth trying to stick it out.

“Welcome to America’s most pro-crypto Congress ever,” Armstrong wrote on X on Nov. 5.

Coinbase's legal chief: 'We are going to have the most pro-crypto Congress ever'

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Data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities

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Data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities

An Amazon Web Services data center in Ashburn, Virginia, US, on Sunday, July 28, 2024.

Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The power needs of artificial intelligence and cloud computing are growing so large that individual data center campuses could soon use more electricity than some cities, and even entire U.S. states, according to companies developing the facilities.

The electricity consumption of data centers has exploded along with their increasingly critical role in the economy in the past 10 years, housing servers that power the applications businesses and consumers rely on for daily tasks.

Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, data centers are growing so large that finding enough power to drive them and enough suitable land to house them will become increasingly difficult, the developers say. The facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power — one billion watts — or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the Pittsburgh area last year.

Technology companies are in a “race of a lifetime to global dominance” in artificial intelligence, said Ali Fenn, president of Lancium, a company that secures land and power for data centers in Texas. “It’s frankly about national security and economic security,” she said. “They’re going to keep spending” because there’s no more profitable place to deploy capital.

Renewable energy alone won’t be sufficient to meet their power needs. Natural gas will have to play a role, developers say, which will slow progress toward meeting carbon dioxide emissions targets.

(See here for which stocks are helping to fix the nation’s power grid.)

Regardless of where the power comes from, data centers are now at a scale where they have started “tapping out against the existing utility infrastructure,” said Nat Sahlstrom, chief energy officer at Tract, a Denver-based company that secures land, infrastructure and power resources for such facilities.

And “the funnel of available of land in this country that’s industrial zone land that can fit the data center use case — it’s becoming more and more constrained,” said Sahlstrom, who previously led Amazon’s energy, water and sustainability teams.

Beyond Virginia

As land and power grow more limited, data centers are expanding into new markets outside the long-established global hub in northern Virginia, Sahlstrom said. The electric grid that serves Virginia is facing looming reliability problems. Power demand is expected to surge, while supply is falling due to the retirement of coal- and some natural gas-powered plants.

Tract, for example, has assembled more than 23,000 acres of land for data center development across the U.S., with large holdings in Maricopa County, Arizona — home to Phoenix — and Storey County, Nevada, near Reno.

Tract recently bought almost 2,100 acres in Buckeye, Arizona with plans to develop the land into one of the largest data center campuses in the country. The privately-held company is working with utilities to secure up to 1.8 gigawatts of power for the site to support as many as 40 individual data centers.

For context, a data center campus with peak demand of one gigawatt is roughly equivalent to the average annual consumption of about 700,000 homes, or a city of around 1.8 million people, according to a CNBC analysis using data from the Department of Energy and Census Bureau.

A data center campus that size would use more power in one year than retail electric sales in Alaska, Rhode Island or Vermont, according to Department of Energy data.

A gigawatt-size data center campus running at even the lower end of peak demand is still roughly comparable to about 330,000 households, or a city of more than 800,000 people — about the population of San Francisco.

The average size of individual data centers operated by the major tech companies is currently around 40 megawatts, but a growing pipeline of campuses of 250 megawatts or more is coming, according to data from the Boston Consulting Group.

The U.S. is expected see a growing number of data center campuses of 500 megawatts or more, equivalent to half a gigawatt, in the 2030s through mid-2040s, according to the BCG data. Facilities of that size are comparable to about 350,000 homes, according to CNBC’s analysis.

“Certainly the average size of the data centers is increasing at a rapid pace from now to 2030,” said Vivian Lee, managing director and partner at BCG.

Community impact

'We need a lot more power' to support the digital transformation, says Vertiv's David Cote

Today, Lancium has five data center campuses in various stages of development. A 1,000-acre campus in Abilene is expected to open in the first quarter of 2025 with 250 megawatts of power that will ramp up to 1.2 gigawatts in 2026.

The minimum power requirement for Lancium’s data center customers is now a gigawatt, and future plans involve scaling them up to between three and five gigawatts, Fenn said.

For data centers that size, developers have to ensure that electricity costs in neighboring communities don’t rise as a consequence and that grid reliability is maintained, Fenn said. Pairing such facilities with new power generation is crucial, she said.

“The data centers have to partner with utilities, the system operators, the communities, to really establish that these things are assets to the grid and not liabilities to the grid,” Fenn said. “Nobody’s going to keep approving” such developments if they push up residential and commercial electric rates.

Renewables not enough

Data center campuses run by publicly-traded Equinix are rising to several hundred megawatts from 100- to 200 megawatts, said Jon Lin, general manager for data center services at the company. Equinix is one of the largest data center operators in the world with 260 facilities spread across 72 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and abroad.

Developers prefer carbon-free renewable energy, but they also see solar and wind alone as unable to meet current demand due to their reliance on changing weather conditions.

Some of the most critical workloads for the world’s economy, such as financial exchanges, run at data centers operated by Equinix, Lin said. Equinix’s data centers are online more than 99% of the time and outages are out of the question, the executive said.

“The firmness of the power is still incredibly important for these data centers, and so doing that solely off of local renewables is candidly just not an option,” Lin said.

The major technology companies are some of the largest purchasers of renewable power in the U.S., but they are increasingly turning to nuclear in search of more reliable sources of electricity. Microsoft is supporting the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania through a power purchase agreement. Amazon and Alphabet’s Google are investing in small nuclear reactors.

AWS CEO on Amazon's $500 million small modular reactors investment

But building new nuclear reactors is expensive and fraught with delays. Two new reactors in Georgia recently came online years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

In the short run, natural gas will fuel much of the power demanded by data centers, Lancium’s Fenn said. Gas is the main, short-term power source providing the reliability these facilities require, Boston Consulting Group’s Lee said.

Investments could be made in new gas generation that adds carbon capture and battery storage technology over time to mitigate the environmental impact, Lee said.

The industry hopes that gas demand will taper off as renewables expand, battery storage costs come down and AI helps data centers operate more efficiently, Fenn said. But in the near term, there’s no question that data center expansion is disrupting technology companies’ emissions targets, she said.

“Hopefully, it’s a short term side step,” Fenn said of stepped-up natural gas usage. “What I’m seeing amongst our data center partners, our hyperscale conversations, is we cannot let this have an adverse effect on the environmental goals.”

Note: CNBC analysis assumes a data center campus is continuously utilizing 85% of its peak demand of a gigawatt throughout the year, for a total consumption of 7.4 billion kilowatt-hours. Analysis uses national averages for household electricity consumption from EIA and household size from Census Bureau.

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