J.B. Straubel left Tesla's inner circle to build the battery material supply chain the U.S. government has identified as a strategic infrastructure priority. The scale of that bet is only starting to come into focus.
In a warehouse outside Carson City, Nevada, J.B. Straubel is running what may be the most important factory most Americans have never heard of. Dead battery packs arrive by the truckload — from Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, and a roster of other partners that now reads like a who's who of the global auto industry. Workers strip them down. Machines shred and separate the cells. Chemistry separates out nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper at recovery rates the company says exceed 95 percent, per Redwood's own disclosures. Those materials go back to Panasonic and other cell makers as feedstock for new batteries. The process is unglamorous, relentless, and, Straubel argues, the only viable foundation for an American EV industry that doesn't depend on Chinese-processed minerals.
Straubel co-founded Tesla in 2003 and spent 16 years as its chief technical architect, designing the battery architecture and power electronics that made the Model 3 feasible at scale. He left in 2019, not to retreat, but to attack the problem from a different angle. The bottleneck, as he saw it, wasn't cell chemistry or vehicle design — it was raw material supply. Someone had to close the loop. Redwood Materials, which he founded in 2017 while still at Tesla and ran concurrently for two years, became that vehicle.
By 2025, Redwood had grown to 1,100 employees, generated $200 million in revenue in 2024, and secured a valuation of roughly $6 billion as of October 2025, per reporting by TechCrunch and Reuters. The U.S. government extended a conditional $2 billion ATVM loan in February 2023, reflecting the strategic importance of domestic battery supply chains. Redwood broke ground on a $3.5 billion battery factory in South Carolina in January 2024, per Time magazine reporting. The company's processing capacity has grown from 6 GWh in 2021 to a target of 100 GWh by 2025 — enough, by Redwood's own projections, to supply material for roughly 1 million new EVs annually. The longer-range target is 500 GWh by 2030.
The 2022 throughput tells the story of the scale gap Redwood is trying to close. That year, Redwood received enough end-of-life batteries to recover materials for approximately 60,000 new EVs. To put that in context, the U.S. sold roughly 1 million new EVs in 2022. Redwood's 2022 intake represented about 6 percent of that number — a sliver of the eventual opportunity and a measure of how far the company still has to go.
The partner roster is where the strategic weight becomes visible. Redwood's agreements now include Panasonic, Ford, Amazon, Volkswagen, GM's Ultium Cells venture, Volvo, Toyota, Southern Company, BMW of North America, and Crusoe, per Redwood Materials' website. That list spans EV makers, battery cell manufacturers, utilities, and technology companies — and it means Redwood is not a niche recycler. It is becoming the primary intermediary between end-of-life battery material and the manufacturers who need it to keep production lines running.
Straubel's pitch, as he has outlined it in interviews including a recent Core Memory podcast episode with Ashlee Vance, is blunt: whoever controls battery materials at industrial scale wins the energy transition. China currently dominates the processing of critical minerals including lithium and cobalt. Redwood's bet is that domestic recycling and refining can displace that dependency — not quickly, and not cheaply, but fundamentally.
The $2 billion DOE loan is not charitable. It reflects a strategic assessment that secure battery supply chains are a matter of infrastructure policy. The $6 billion valuation reflects private investors — including T. Rowe Price, Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Ford, Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, and, in a later round, Eclipse Capital and Nvidia's NVentures — concluding the same thing, per reporting by TechCrunch and Reuters. Per the Redwood Materials website, the company also acquired the German recycling firm Redux in 2023 and is deploying large-scale energy storage systems using new and repurposed battery packs for data centers and the national grid.
The scale Redwood is pursuing is not incremental. Going from 100 GWh to 500 GWh in five years would require roughly quintupling throughput while simultaneously bringing the South Carolina factory online and keeping unit economics viable. The 500 GWh target would represent a capacity roughly equal to the entire U.S. EV market's annual battery demand as of the early 2020s. Whether Redwood can build that fast, finance that much, and attract enough end-of-life battery volume to feed it is the open question the partner roster and the DOE loan do not answer.
What is clear is that Redwood is not positioning itself as a cleanup operation for old laptops and power tools. It is building the infrastructure layer for a domesticated battery supply chain — the missing link between a fleet of millions of EVs reaching end-of-life and the manufacturers who need their materials back. If Straubel is right, the company becomes irreplaceable. If the company stumbles on execution, financing, or the sheer physics of scaling materials processing fast enough, the energy transition runs through Beijing for another generation. That is the bet.