Second-life EV batteries get tick from US data center operator

Crusoe and Redwood Energy announced this week that the pair is expanding their specialized data center project located at Redwood’s battery recycling campus in Sparks, Nevada. 

Data center developer Crusoe – which also announced a significant deal for 12 GWh of energy from iron-air energy storage maker Form Energy this week – has multiple approaches to its build-out of computing power. 

The expansion with Redwood will continue the modular approach, and Crusoe will add 20 of its Crusoe Spark modular data centers, filled with servers that likely include NVIDIA GPUs for running AI models and inferencing, to the site’s existing four, bringing the total to 24 units, bringing power demand to 20 MW. 

The original build was a 12 MW / 63 MWh microgrid that combined solar and repurposed electric vehicle batteries to power four Crusoe Spark modular data centers. The project was built in just under four months, according to the companies.

The microgrid avoids the need for data centers to require a utility connection, as the off-grid microgrid consists of on-site solar panels paired with the 12 MW / 63 MWh battery array, built from second-life packs, via electric vehicles that no longer have the capacity for driving but can still hold a stationary charge.

The solar park was built with Erthos, which ground-mounts the solar system rather than using fixed-tile or trackers.

Redwood’s challenge isn’t just second-life batteries but orchestration to handle uneven discharge from variously degraded EV battery packs to provide steady power. Redwood notes, without further explanation, that since June 2025, the setup has maintained 99.2% operational availability. In data center terms, that kind of downtime is significant as most developers will want 99.9%+ uptime, up to “four” or “five-nines” for higher-tier data center operations. Still, Crusoe says its Crusoe Cloud maintains 99.9%, leveraging the local grid as a backup power source.

In any case, the combination of the experimental infrastructure and grid has proven its value to Crusoe as it boosts its demand further.

What they said:

JB Straubel, Founder and CEO of Redwood Materials: “Since launch, the Redwood Energy and Crusoe system has demonstrated that repurposed EV batteries can reliably power high-performance compute workloads at scale. Achieving 99.2% uptime validated our approach and gave us the confidence to expand compute capacity nearly sevenfold on the same energy infrastructure.”

Cully Cavness, Co-Founder, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Crusoe: “By expanding our work with Redwood Energy to 20 MW, we are proving that the ‘AI factory’ of the future can be quickly scaled through the convergence of innovative energy solutions and modular infrastructure deployment.