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We’re kicking off this week’s Green Deals with a mix between one new release along with several budget-friendly options for your commutes and lawn mowing duties. To start, we have NIU’s BQi-C3 Pro e-bike that not only offers up to 90 miles of travel (and a bunch of solid features), but is also dropping down to a new $999 low. Behind it is Segway’s latest flagship release, the Ninebot Max G3 Electric Scooter, which is getting a $400 post-launch discount to $1,000. There’s also Leviton’s NACS to J1772 EV Charger Adaptor dropping to $32, as well as the popular Greenworks 40V 16-inch Cordless Push Lawn Mower that comes with a 4.0Ah battery for $210. Plus, all the other hangover Green Deals from last week are in the links at the bottom of the page, collected together in our Electrified Weekly roundup – but don’t miss out on the many sales that are ending tonight!

Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.

Get a long-traveling budget-friendly commuter in NIU’s BQi3-C3 Pro e-bike at a new $999 low

Best Buy is offering the best rate yet on the NIU BQi-C3 Pro e-bike for $999 shipped. Normally posted up at a $2,200 price tag, this e-bike has been more frequently seen discounted between $1,300 and $1,500 on average, with the $1,299 low appearing more often too since first appearing in June. Today’s deal though takes costs lower than we’ve ever seen them with a 55% markdown that puts $1,201 back into your pocket for a new all-time low and the best price we have currently find.

With three colorways to choose from – black, white, or grey – NIU’s BQi-C3 Pro e-bike offers up some solid commuting power at a far more affordable rate than many other models with similar capabilities. The streamlined frame houses dual integrated 10.0Ah batteries that work alongside the 750W rear hub motor and Gates carbon belt to provide top speeds of 28 MPH for up to 90 miles on a single five-hour charge when its three PAS levels are being utilized.

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Your ride is further enhanced by the extra features you’ll find here, like the integrated rear cargo rack, front suspension, puncture-resistant tires, and a 3.5-inch TFT color display. Along with these, you’ll also find fenders over both those tires, an LED headlight and taillight, a kickstand, and mechanical disc brakes – plus, all its wiring is internally routed for a cleaner look on top of the motor’s IP65 waterproof rating and the batteries’ IP67 rating.

Segway Ninebot Max G3 Electric Scooter

Segway’s new Ninebot Max G3 e-scooter with Apple Find My and autonomous locking falls to $1,000

Amazon is now offering the new Segway Ninebot Max G3 Electric Scooter for $999.99 shipped. Coming down from its $1,400 price tag, this all-new flagship e-scooter just officially hit the market a week ago after having a pre-launch sale that saw it drop to $900. If you missed out on those pre-sale savings this is the next-best price we have seen, cutting $400 off the going rate to give you the second-lowest price we have tracked and even coming in $100 under Segway’s direct site.

Picking up the mantle from the Max G2, Segway’s all-new Ninebot Max G3 brings some impressive upgrades to your commute, starting with an 800W motor that can peak all the way to 2,000W, tackling up to 30% inclines at top speeds up to 28 MPH. By activating its Boost Mode, acceleration is pushed to its max, getting you up to 15.5 MPH in 2.4 seconds before increasing further up to its top speed. With the 597Wh battery that it’s been given, travel distance has been bumped up to 50 miles on only 3.5 hours of charging, which is due to the built-in fast-charger – plus, by connecting a DC charger cable for simultaneous charging, you can hop back on to ride in a shorter 2.5-hour timeframe.

Among its upgraded features you’ll find improved handling, disturbance resistance, and slip resistance at any speed thanks to the Stability Enhancement System here. Two notable standout features though, are the Apple Find My inclusion alongside the autonomous locking/unlocking functionality, which you can adjust in terms of its activation via your distance from it. There’s also the dual suspension, 11-inch self-sealing tires, the automatic 6W headlight, underglow deck lighting, and a 2,4-inch smart TFT display which provides navigation, caller IC, and smart charge management through your phone.

Leviton NACS to J1772 EV charger adaptor

Add Leviton’s NACS to J1772 EV adapter to your glove box for wider charging access at $32

As part of its Big Spring Sale, Amazon is having a Lightning deal on the Leviton NACS to J1772 EV Charger Adapter for $31.60 Prime shipped, with non-members needing a cart total of over $35 to score the free shipping. This handy little adapter normally keeps up at its $39 MSRP, which is getting a solid 19% markdown here today for as long as supplies last. What few discounts we’ve seen have mostly kept prices above $35, though December did see a drop to the $31.20 low that repeated once at the top of the month. You’re looking at the second-lowest price we have tracked here today, which comes in just $0.40 above the lowest ever.

If you’re sticking with your Tesla or any NACS-centered EV and want to expand your charging options, this might be a good adapter to have tucked away in your glove box. You’ll gain access to any charging station that sports J1772 connectors – so trips visiting friends and family with such setups no longer need planning around should you need to top of your EV’s battery. Not only is it designed to have no problems in indoor and outdoor environments, regardless of the season, but it also allows for up to 60A charging speeds when in use.

Greenworks 40V 16-inch cordless electric push lawn mower

Get lawn care support on a budget with Greenworks’ 40V 16-inch cordless push mower at $210

As part of its Big Spring Sale, Amazon is offering the Greenworks 40V 16-inch Cordless Push Lawn Mower with a 4.0Ah battery for $209.99 shipped. This model has been keeping down at $300 lately, a drop-off from its usual $330 price tag, with the discounts in 2025 mostly dropping costs between $250 and $225, though there have been occasional returns to this same rate, which we last spotted in February. While we have seen it go lower in the past, you’re still looking at the best price on Amazon for the last year, saving you $90 ($120 off its previous price tag) while also getting you prepped for mowing duties throughout the warmer months ahead. It’s even beating out Greenwrok’s direct site by $90.

This 40V Greenworks push lawn mower is a budget-friendly model that is perfect for smaller yards, as the included 4.0Ah battery provides it with enough juice for 45 minutes of runtime on a single charge, though you can certainly switch it out with others to extend performance. There are five cutting height positions that you can choose from here, ranging from 1 1/4 inches to 3 3/8 inches, with the push button start eliminating the need to wrestle with pull-strings and the foldable frame saving you storage space. It even provides two different collection options, mulching or rear-bagging, giving you more versatility over single-function counterparts.

Best New Year EV deals!

Best new Green Deals landing this week

The savings this week are also continuing to a collection of other markdowns. To the same tune as the offers above, these all help you take a more energy-conscious approach to your routine. Winter means you can lock in even better off-season price cuts on electric tools for the lawn while saving on EVs and tons of other gear.

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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

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October 5, 2025

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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI's nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.

OpenAI

It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.

“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”

His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.

Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”

The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.

“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.

Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.

With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.

Inside OpenAI's data center site search

The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.

“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.

A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.

‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’

Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.

In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.

“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”

Competition is fierce.

Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.

The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.

OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.

And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.

While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.

OpenAI's stealth site search drew more than 800 bids since January 2025

“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.

Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.

“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.

“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.

He understands why many people are skeptical.

“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”

WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

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Cadillac’s quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

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9 hours ago

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October 5, 2025

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Cadillac's quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

Two in five Cadillacs sold since July were electric, propelling the brand to its best third quarter in over a decade.

There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.

GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.

As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.

Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.

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EV MODEL   Q3 25/Q3 24   Q3 25 Q3 24  YTD 25/YTD 24   YTD 25 YTD 24
Chevrolet Equinox EV +156.70% 25,085 9,772 +389.88% 52,834 10,785
Chevrolet Blazer EV +1.14% 8,089 7,998 +36.72% 20,825 15,232
Chevrolet Silverado EV +97.49% 3,940 1,995 +78.58% 9,379 5,252
Chevrolet BrightDrop * 2,384 * * 3,976 0
GMC Hummer EV Pickup +21.86% 5,246 4,305 +48.65% 13,233 8,902
GMC Sierra EV +771.84% 3,374 387 +1,488.37% 6,147 387
Cadillac Optiq * 4,886 * * 9,826 0
Cadillac Lyriq +1.18% 7,309 7,224 -18.17% 16,626 20,318
Cadillac Vistiq * 3,924 * * 5,669 0
Cadillac Escalade IQ * 2,264 * * 6,030 0
Total +109.91% 66,501 31,681 +137.44% 144,545 60,876

Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.

That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).

It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.

You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.

Cadillac Escalade IQ review

SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.

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Tesla teases mysterious new product unveiling this week

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9 hours ago

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October 5, 2025

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Tesla teases mysterious new product unveiling this week

Tesla product tease 10/7

Tesla is teasing the unveiling of a mysterious new product planned for Tuesday, October 7th this week.

The teaser is ambiguous, which is sparking speculation.

On Sunday, Tesla released a short teaser on X featuring a few seconds of what appears to be a wheel or a fan spinning and ending with the date “10/7”:

Due to the ambiguous nature of Tesla’s teaser, people are speculating as to what the automaker plans to unveil on Tuesday.

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Let us speculate.

Electrek’s Take

Of course, Tesla being an automaker, people would quickly think this is a wheel. However, due to the alignment and the lack of lugs, I doubt this is a wheel.

If it has to do with a wheel, it would make more sense for this to be a wheel cover.

A wheel cover could indicate that Tesla will unveil the new, stripped-down Model Y. Timing-wise, this makes the most sense, as we have been expecting Tesla to launch the cheaper Model Y early in Q4.

It could also be a fan. What Tesla product could have a fan?

Elon Musk has been discussing Tesla’s potential development of an HVAC system for a long time, but I haven’t seen significant evidence that Tesla has been actively working on it.

The next-gen Roadster? Maybe Tesla has put some fans for downforce? The timing of that could also make sense, as Musk has been promising a demo by the end of the year. However, we heard that one a few times before.

Several media outlets are reporting that Ferrari is set to unveil its first electric car this week, so Tesla may be looking to steal some of its shine.

What do you think Tesla is teasing here? Let us know in the comment section below.


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