The race to power AI data centers has gained a new entrant - and from the auto industry, no less. GM announced its entry into the energy-storage business with two moves at once: a partnership with the startup Peak Energy to develop a new sodium-ion battery chemistry for the electricity grid, and an expanded collaboration with Redwood Materials, which turns old electric-vehicle batteries into electricity storage.

The sodium move is the more interesting one: no carmaker outside China has so far publicly announced the production of sodium-ion cells. „We're entering the market the easy way, through energy-storage systems. The performance characteristics are exactly what that market needs," says Kurt Kelty, GM's vice president for batteries and sustainability. The company has invested 900 million dollars in commercializing new battery chemistries, including a new development center.

Why sodium? It's cheaper than lithium, lasts longer and overheats far less easily - at the cost of bigger, heavier batteries for the same amount of electricity. For the grid, where the battery sits in a container on concrete, the weight bothers no one. Peak Energy has already developed systems without cooling and without fire-protection equipment. „The hardest part to engineer is the one that isn't there. Eliminate the part, you eliminate the problem," says Paul Manson, GM's director for energy-storage commercialization. Pilot production of the first generation of cells is planned for 2028.

Meanwhile, the old-battery business is already running. Redwood operates a microgrid of 12 megawatts and 63 megawatt-hours made of used vehicle batteries, powering a Crusoe data center in Nevada. GM supplies it with about 10,000 used battery packs and is buying its own 7.2-megawatt-hour system for a Michigan factory - with a projected saving of around 3 million dollars over its working life.

The picture is clear: Redwood started last year, Ford announced repurposing battery capacity, now GM too. The auto industry has realized that the AI industry's hunger for electricity is a market that needs neither wheels nor drivers. „The factory is now safer. In the end we'll have installations like this in all our factories - it's simply economically logical," Kelty says. When a carmaker starts making money from containers of batteries, that says something about cars - and about electricity.