JB Straubel of Redwood Materials built an off-grid AI data center powered by repurposed EV batteries and solar panels with autonomous cleaning robots. The system runs NVIDIA GPUs for Crusoe Energy and keeps batteries in use longer before recycling, avoiding any strain on the public grid.
Alright, we're in Nevada with JB Straubel and Redwood Materials. This is kind of the next chapter of the company. JB, do you mind describing what we're looking at?
Well, we're standing here in the middle of one of our energy storage arrays where we've got a whole field full of these, you know, former EV battery packs all linked together with our custom power electronics and software software and controls. And this whole array of batteries you see, you know, behind us and alongside of us is storing energy and then powering these modular data centers full of NVIDIA GPUs running AI workload. Crusoe Energy is our partner on those data centers. And the energy to charge the batteries and to run this whole thing is being provided over here by solar panels behind us with these cool little robots that run along cleaning them.
I don't see one right now, but blowing dust off. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so sun comes down, hits these solar panels, fills all these batteries which are coming from EV packs that otherwise, I don't know, you guys would have recycled or in previous time would have just got chucked out somewhere.
Yeah, and still will recycle as soon as they're not useful enough even for this. Okay. So, you know, we kind of invented this application and being able to remanufacture and reuse these packs as a sort of, you know, intermediate function on the way to being recycled.. But even if we can run them for a few months, it's a very valuable function. And you know, that alone increases the value of the battery more than just the materials we recover when we recycle it.
Yeah, okay, super cool. So this is the first one and I assume there's going to be more coming?
Yeah, kind of generation 1 and we've got a lot of improvements already that aren't embodied here, you know, so this is kind of a a first implementation, but it's, it's pretty visual. I mean, you can stand here and just see like solar panels, batteries, data center.
It makes sense.
Yeah, to me that's kind of a neat thing. And many times you'll see a data center and you have no idea where the power came from, you know, was it a nuclear plant or a power plant far away? But in this case, it's all very modular and disconnected from the grid, so there's no chance that any of this is affecting anyone's grid prices because it's completely separate from the grid.
Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much.
Yeah, my pleasure.
