The race to secure power for AI data centers has spilled over into some unusual places, including the automotive world. 

Battery recycler Redwood Materials kicked off the trend last year with a new energy storage division and a project that attached old EV packs to a Crusoe data center in Nevada. Then, Ford said it was repurposing some of its battery manufacturing capacity to make grid-scale batteries. And now GM is announcing its own — arguably more ambitious — plans for an energy storage system (ESS). 

GM unveiled on Tuesday two new phases in its attack on the energy storage market. The biggest swing by far is GM’s new partnership with energy storage startup Peak Energy. For that partnership, GM is developing an entirely new sodium-ion battery chemistry tailored for grid-scale deployments.

Outside of China, no automaker has announced plans to build sodium-ion cells. 

“The way we’re getting into the market is the easy way, through ESS,” Kurt Kelty, vice president of battery and sustainability at GM, told TechCrunch. “The performance characteristics are just what is needed in that market.”

GM wouldn’t share with TechCrunch how much money it is investing in this energy storage effort. But we do know the company has committed $900 million to commercialize new battery chemistries, an investment that includes a new battery development center.

Sodium-ion batteries work similarly to lithium-ion, but they swap out key materials to make the cells cheaper, longer lasting, and less prone to overheating. The tradeoff is that sodium-ion batteries need to be larger and heavier to store the same amount of electricity. 

Peak Energy has already been working on energy storage systems that use sodium-ion batteries. Because sodium-ion batteries behave differently from lithium-ion, Peak has developed an energy storage system with that in mind. Its grid-scale batteries don’t have cooling systems or fire suppression systems because there’s less risk of overheating. The setup reduces upfront costs, and it should also eliminate costly maintenance, Paul Menson, director of energy storage commercialization at GM, told TechCrunch. 

“This is the manifestation of the hardest part to engineer is no part at all,” he said. “Eliminate the part, eliminate the problem.”

GM plans to sell sodium-ions cells to the startup, which will then integrate them into its products. But that won’t happen right away.

The first GM cells are expected to enter trial production at the company’s Battery Cell Development Center in 2028. TechCrunch was recently given an exclusive look at the new facility, which GM expects will cut about a year from the commercialization process for sodium-ion batteries, reducing costs in the process. 

GM’s sodium-ion cells are still years away from commercial production, however. In the meantime, the automaker will sell lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells to LG Energy Solution for use in its energy storage systems. LG Energy Solution already works with GM through its Ultium joint venture, which makes batteries for the automaker’s EVs.

Alongside the partnerships with LG and Peak, GM announced that it was expanding its work with Redwood Materials, the battery recycling and energy storage startup founded by former Tesla executive J.B. Straubel. 

Redwood already buys scrap from GM’s battery factories and used battery packs from its EVs. GM has a pipeline of around 10,000 packs it’s sending to Redwood, and the startup has been operating a 12 megawatt/63-megawatt-hour migrogrid using second-life packs at a Crusoe data center in Sparks, Nevada. GM said it is buying a 7.2 megawatt-hour Redwood system for use at one of its plants in Michigan, which it estimates will save it around $3 million over its lifetime.

The GM installation is “a step one” for Redwood, Cal Lankton, chief commercial officer for Redwood, told TechCrunch.

Data centers, where Redwood already operates, and industrial sites like GM’s are “vastly different things,” he said. Where data centers might use batteries nearly continuously to absorb some of the power fluctuations from GPUs, industrial sites are more likely to use them to shave off peaks in power demand, which can lower monthly power bills, and use them to provide backup power in case of an outage.

“The factory is really excited because now we’ve got a more reliable factory,” Kelty said. “Ultimately, we’ll be having similar installations like this at all of our factories. It just makes good economic sense.”

The Pentagon has added Alibaba, Baidu, EV-maker BYD, and buzzy robotics company Unitree to a list of entities it says support the Chinese military.

The expansion of the list increases the chance that the Department of Defense could make it harder for U.S. companies to do business with these entities. It’s also likely to further strain the tension between the U.S. and Chinese governments.

“We categorically reject the inclusion of Baidu on the list, and there is no credible justification for adding Baidu to the list,” Baidu said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The suggestion that Baidu is a military company is entirely baseless. We will not hesitate to use all options available to us to have the company removed from the list.”

Alibaba told TechCrunch that it “is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy. We will take all available legal action against attempts to misrepresent our company.”

The list — known as the 1260H list, for the specific section of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act that created it — is just one tool that the U.S. has used to place restrictions on Chinese tech. President Donald Trump has used tariffs in both of his terms to put pressure on China, including a 100% tax on imported Chinese EVs.

This particular update to the 1260H list was briefly published in February, before being pulled from the Federal Register for unexplained reasons, as Bloomberg News notes.

Most of China’s biggest artificial intelligence players are now on the list, with Tencent added last year. This comes as Trump has said he’s weighing whether the U.S. should take equity stakes in the country’s top AI companies.

The updated list now includes 188 companies.

The Pentagon added a handful of automotive industry players to the list this year. In addition to BYD, trendy EV company Nio and battery companies CALB Group and EVE Energy were added. RoboSense, one of China’s leading makers of lidar sensors, has joined its rival Hesai on the list, too. Baidu is also one of China’s leaders in autonomous vehicles.

BYD, Nio, and RoboSense did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This story has been updated with responses from Alibaba and Baidu.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, the company announced Monday in a blog post. The filing comes a little more than a week after its main rival, Anthropic, also filed to go public, ramping up the race between the two AI firms.

OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion post-money, submitted a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. OpenAI hasn’t shared any specifics yet. However, the company said it posted the blog because it expected a leak.

“We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” the company wrote. “But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

Around the same time, and in a separate blog post, OpenAI published a sweeping philosophical statement about its mission, its vision for AGI, and its belief that AI should benefit all of humanity — the kind of forward-looking communication that companies entering a quiet period have historically been careful to avoid. That OpenAI appears comfortable publishing it so close to a confidential filing says something — not necessarily about its own legal judgment but about the regulatory environment it’s operating in. The SEC under the Trump administration has taken a markedly more hands-off posture toward tech and AI companies than it did under previous administrations, and OpenAI may simply be reading the room.

Whatever the regulatory questions, the filing is the latest signal that 2026 will be a blockbuster year for the public markets. SpaceX is also expected to make its debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation, meaning three of the most closely watched companies in tech could all go public within months of each other — a concentration of high-stakes offerings the markets haven’t seen since the dot-com boom.

OpenAI is racing to IPO even as it recently missed its own targets for new users and revenue, per The Wall Street Journal. Its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has reportedly raised concerns that OpenAI may not be able to support its massive data center spending. And the burn does appear to be massive. 

In late March, OpenAI secured $122 billion in the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history — $3 billion of which came directly from retail investors via bank channels. But the firm expects to spend roughly that same amount on computing power for AI research alone in 2028, and projects burning $85 billion that year even after doubling sales from the year prior, per The Wall Street Journal. Put another way, OpenAI is asking public market investors to buy into a business that, by its own projections, won’t generate more cash than it spends for at least four more years.

SpaceX offers a parallel data point. Its AI spending, while not as massive, illustrates how the cost to train large language models can exceed the revenue those models generate — a structural challenge the entire industry is grappling with, and one that public market investors will have to price.

Anthropic, on the other hand, has provided investors a much rosier picture of its financials, saying that it is close to achieving its first quarterly profit. Even so, with a recent $65 billion funding round and another $36 billion in chip-allocated debt potentially on its way, Anthropic’s burn rate isn’t exactly modest. 

The confidential IPO filing allows OpenAI to start its preparation for a public offering without publicly disclosing detailed financial information or business risks, which is why the company hasn’t shared stock pricing or how much it hopes to raise yet. That said, the secondary markets provide a glimpse into what investors are willing to pay. 

Anthropic recently surged to a $1 trillion valuation on Forge Global, a retail secondary market platform, surpassing OpenAI, which was recorded at around $880 billion in April. 

David Shapiro is founder and CEO of OpenVC and overseer of the NYSE OpenVC 500 Index, which tracks the largest public and private companies in the U.S. He said Anthropic’s rate of appreciation far exceeds OpenAI this year — 123% year-to-date versus OpenAI’s 11.3%. That said, despite Anthropic’s clear boost, OpenAI isn’t seeing a lack of secondary interest. 

“From a secondary investor standpoint, OpenAI had already grown into a significant portion of its valuation,” Shapiro told TechCrunch. “We haven’t seen OpenAI crater or anything close, and the valuation is still enormously successful, according to the index.”

He added that OpenAI’s stock in the secondary market “experienced a slight pop over the last few days, indicating investors may be pricing both as the ‘dual winners’ of the broader LLM race.”

But the race to get to the public markets first is a real concern. Experts say whoever makes their debut first will likely nab more of what is becoming increasingly scarce capital for AI companies — much of which may have already been absorbed by SpaceX, which is expected to IPO first among the three.

Additionally, Anthropic’s filing disclosures will set a valuation comp that constrains how OpenAI can price its own offering when it files, according to a recent PitchBook report that characterized OpenAI as overvalued relative to its fundamentals. In other words, if Anthropic prices conservatively, OpenAI’s path to its target valuation gets harder.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and disrupted the world of AI when it released ChatGPT in 2022, sparking a wave of large language model advancements across the industry.

While OpenAI has expanded its products to accommodate enterprise and government customers, the firm has a strong reputation of being more consumer-focused than rival Anthropic. The company has built real scale, with around 900 million weekly active users.

The IPO comes after significant internal struggles within the company. In 2022, OpenAI’s board ousted Sam Altman over what it described as a lack of transparency and concerns about whether he was committed to the firm’s mission of benefiting all humanity. Altman was quickly reinstated, and the board members who were involved in the coup, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, departed shortly after. The episode raised governance questions that have never been fully resolved and that prospective public investors will likely scrutinize closely.

More recently, OpenAI has faced several lawsuits, including a recent one from the state of Florida accusing the company and Altman of harming children by providing information to school shooters, offering guidance on self-harm, and fostering addiction among young users. Florida’s complaint adds to the litany of lawsuits against OpenAI and other chatbot makers following user delusions, self-harm, suicide, and mass casualty events.

Last month, OpenAI prevailed at trial after co-founder and rival Elon Musk sued the company and Altman over an alleged promise to keep the company a nonprofit. The case was ultimately tossed out after both a jury and judge found Musk had waited too long — he was beyond the statute of limitations when he filed the case in 2024. 

OpenAI has also faced criticism after its president, Greg Brockman, and his wife each donated $12.5 million to Leading the Future, a pro-AI political action committee dedicated to thwarting local politicians who advocate for AI regulation. Both also made similar contributions to MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC. OpenAI has tried to distance itself from what it calls Brockman’s personal donations, saying the funds were not provided on behalf of the company.