EPA doubles electric school bus funding to almost $1B after overwhelming initial demand
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Thursday that the agency will almost double its funding for electric school buses to close to $1 billion after school districts from all 50 states applied for rebates.
Electric school buses are quickly taking over streets around the US as school districts and state leaders see how they can benefit the communities they serve in.
According to Dominion Energy, a power provider promoting the use of EVs for a cleaner and sustainable future, replacing one diesel bus can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 54,000 pounds annually.
With help from Dominion’s initiatives, the second largest electric bus fleet in the US just crossed 500,000 service miles. By implementing EV buses, Virginia school districts were able to avoid 447.7 short tons of greenhouse gases.
These toxic fumes are known to creep into the bus’s interior while the bus is idling, harming the health of students taking them every day. A 2002 Yale study found dangerous particle levels were five to ten times higher while buses were stopped.
Although new standards have come along since then, it’s still not enough to limit the exposure when you can cut it out altogether.
Not only do electric school buses produce zero emissions, but they can also save school districts money on fuel and repair costs in the long run. For example, The Modesto Unified School District in California, which ordered 30 Blue Bird EV school buses, expects to save $250,000 a year on fuel.
With federal and many state funding options, there’s never been a better time to convert to an all-electric school bus fleet.
EPA doubles funding for electric school bus fleets across the US
The EPA Clean School Bus Program, part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, provides $5 billion in funding for electric school buses through the next five years.
The first round of funding, announced in May, was supposed to free up $500 million, but after overwhelming demand from school districts across all 50 states, the EPA will now be almost doubling it to $965 million.
The EPA received about 2,000 applications, amounting to nearly $4 billion in funding, with over 90% submitting for zero-emission electric school buses. Sue Gander, director of the electric school bus initiative at the World Resources Institute, highlights the demand for fully electric options, claiming:
There’s more to the story. The overwhelming demand for electric school buses, over any other fuel type, is striking. Applicants across the country chose electric buses over propane at a rate of 10 to 1. There’s no doubt we’re entering a new, electric era in student transportation, one with massive benefits for our kids’ health, climate and the economy.
With requests for over eight times the initial funding round, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said on the program’s success thus far:
America’s school districts delivered this message loud and clear – we must replace older, dirty diesel school buses. Together, we can reduce climate pollution, improve air quality, and reduce the risk of health impacts like asthma for as many as 25 million children who ride the bus every day.
The EPA said it’s “moving swiftly” to review applications and expects the list of winning applicants to be released in October 2022. Applicants will be selected through a lottery-based system.
Another $1 billion round of funding for electric school buses will be in the Fiscal Year 2023, according to the EPA. The agency plans the next funding program to launch in the next few months, including a grant competition.
However, more may need to be done. Senator Carper, chair of the senate committee on environmental and public works, talks about the need for further funding, saying:
Given the response to the availability of these dollars, it’s clear that more funding is needed. I look forward to working with Administrator Regan, the rest of the Biden Administration, and my colleagues in Congress to build on this progress so that more communities can realize the clean air and energy saving benefits of these cleaner vehicles.
Will we have access to more funding for electric school buses? Time will tell. If the initial demand is any indication, school districts are ready and willing. It’s time to get the funding to make it happen.
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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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Environment
Rivian to lay off about 4% of staff to possibly lean down ahead of 2026 R2 launch [Update]
![Rivian to lay off about 4% of staff to possibly lean down ahead of 2026 R2 launch [Update]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/07/Rivian-R2-pre-orders.jpeg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
A report this morning detailed American EV automaker Rivian’s plans to lay off a portion of its current workforce as it tries to conserve cash while gearing up for the launch of its newest model, the R2, next year.
Update 10/23/25: As promised, Rivian followed up with more details of this morning’s report regarding layoffs. The following letter from Rivian founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, was sent out to the automaker’s workforce moments ago:
Hi Team,
I am writing to share a difficult update.
With the launch of R2 in front of us and the need to profitably scale our business, we have made the very difficult decision to make a number of structural adjustments to our teams. These changes result in a reduction in the size of our team by roughly 4.5%.
These are not changes that were made lightly. With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling our go-to-market functions. This news is challenging to hear, and the hard work and contributions of the team members who are leaving are greatly appreciated.
To ensure we move forward with clarity, I want to summarize the areas most impacted.
- Streamlining the Customer Journey: To provide a seamless experience for our customers, we are integrating the Vehicle Operations workstreams into the Service organization to create fewer customer handoffs and clearer ownership. We are also integrating the Delivery and Mobile Operations into the Sales organization to ensure the purchase experience is as seamless as possible with a single touchpoint throughout the entire sales process and to delivery.
- Elevating Our Marketing Efforts: Historically we have had multiple functions that collectively capture what would typically be housed in a single marketing organization. We have made the decision to form a single marketing organization, and while we recruit our first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), I will be acting as Interim CMO. Our Marketing Experiences team, led by Denise Cherry, and the Creative Studio team, led by Matt Soldan, will both report directly to me for now.
These changes are being made to ensure we can deliver on our potential by scaling efficiently towards building a healthy and profitable business. I am incredibly confident in R2 and the hard work of our teams to deliver and ramp this incredible product.
Thanks again everyone.
RJ
Not much backstory here, so we’ll get right into it.
A report from the Wall Street Journal this morning shared brief details of Rivian’s layoff plans, which could affect approximately 4% of the current staff. At the end of 2024, Rivian’s workforce tally sat around 15,000 people, so the reported layoff could affect as many as 600 individuals, possibly more.
Other outlets have pointed out that EV automakers like Rivian have faced a tougher market following the end of the $7,500 federal tax incentive. While that may be true to a certain extent, most of Rivian’s R1 variants didn’t qualify, unless it was a lease, and the automaker has deployed its own incentive programs.
In fact, Rivian’s Q3 2025 deliveries exceeded expectations. It remains speculative at this point until we receive an official statement from Rivian explaining the plans to lay off staff, but this could be a preemptive decision based on market forecasts.
Furthermore, Rivian is closer than ever to launching R2 in 2026, which has the makings of becoming a bestseller in the EV industry if sales match a mere portion of the hype surrounding it. The layoffs could also be a lean-down to conserve funds through the home stretch of that development process before beefing back up again in 2026 or 2027 when demand is (ideally) higher.
We really do not and will not know the reasoning behind the decision until Rivian shares more information.
We reached out to Rivian for comment and were told the automaker will have more to share this afternoon. We will update this story as new information becomes available.
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