On March 24, 2026, Crusoe, an AI infrastructure company, and Redwood Materials, a leader in battery recycling and energy storage, announced a major expansion of their existing partnership.
The move scales their joint operations in Sparks, Nevada, to seven times the original AI infrastructure density, providing a blueprint for how second-life batteries can power high-performance computing.
From Pilot to Scale: 7x Growth
The expansion follows a successful pilot program launched in June 2025. Initially, the project utilized four Crusoe Spark™ modular data centers. Following seven months of high performance, the companies are increasing the deployment to 24 modular data centers.
This growth is made possible by the hardware’s “modular” nature. Unlike traditional data centers that require years of stationary construction, modular units can be manufactured off-site and deployed in months.
Powering AI with Second-Life Batteries
A central component of this partnership is the use of “second-life” electric vehicle (EV) batteries. When EV batteries are no longer optimal for automotive use, they often retain significant capacity for stationary energy storage.
Redwood Materials integrates these repurposed batteries into a 12-megawatt (MW) / 63-megawatt-hour (MWh) microgrid. This system, combined with on-site solar power, provides the energy required to run Crusoe’s AI-optimized GPUs. The orchestration of these batteries is handled by Redwood’s “Pack Manager” technology, which ensures steady power delivery for the intense workloads required by AI model training and inference.
Reliability and Performance Metrics
A primary concern with renewable-powered microgrids is “uptime”, the percentage of time the system is operational. The press release highlights several key performance indicators from the initial seven-month period:
99.2% Operational Availability: The microgrid exceeded reliability expectations while running on renewable sources and battery storage.
99.9% Total Uptime: By leveraging the traditional power grid as a backup source, Crusoe Cloud maintained a nearly constant state of operation.
Supply Chain and Sustainability
The partnership addresses two of the most significant bottlenecks in the current AI boom: energy consumption and deployment speed.
Sustainability: By using recycled materials and on-site renewable energy, the “AI factory” model reduces the carbon footprint associated with massive data processing.
Predictability: The ability to scale in months rather than years allows AI providers to meet the rapidly fluctuating demand for compute power.
As the demand for intelligence grows, the convergence of innovative energy storage and modular infrastructure—as demonstrated by Crusoe and Redwood Materials—offers a potential path forward for sustainable and rapid industrial scaling.
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