Inside The World's Largest Battery Recyling Operation - The Redwood Materials Factory Tour

JB Straubel helped turn Tesla into a giant, then he walked away to chase a stranger idea: that the millions of dead batteries piling up across America are actually one of the richest mines on the planet. In this Core Memory factory tour, Ashlee Vance spends an afternoon inside Redwood Materials in Nevada, where old laptops, e-bikes, cell phones, toothbrushes and entire EV battery packs roll in by the truckload and leave as pure copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. Redwood now takes in roughly 70 percent of the lithium-ion batteries reaching the end of their life in the United States, and it has quietly become the largest cobalt producer in the country without digging a single hole in the ground. Straubel walks Ashlee through the entire operation, from the receiving yards where crews test whether a tired EV pack should be recycled or revived, to RC1, the recycling line Redwood engineered and built from scratch because no vendor on earth sold one. It bakes batteries in an oxygen free chamber to pull the metals back out without melting anything and without burning fossil fuels. Then comes the part almost nobody saw coming. Redwood is taking used EV batteries that still have plenty of life left and wiring hundreds of them together into massive energy storage arrays. One of those arrays, paired with a flat sea of solar panels, is already running NVIDIA GPUs inside Crusoe data centers, with no diesel backup generators anywhere in sight. It is a rare, ground level look at how battery recycling, critical minerals and AI infrastructure are colliding in the Nevada desert, and at how one of the most hands on engineers in tech is trying to beat China and the mining industry on cost while keeping the whole thing profitable. If you want to understand where EVs, energy storage and American manufacturing are really headed, this one is worth the full tour. About The Host Ashlee Vance is a best-selling author, filmmaker and journalist who has spent more than twenty years chronicling science and technology for The Economist, The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek. He wrote the best-selling biography of Elon Musk and the book When the Heavens Went on Sale, and he has made Emmy-nominated television along the way. On Core Memory, he drops into the labs, garages, factories and hangars where the future is actually being built. LINKS Redwood Materials: https://www.redwoodmaterials.com Crusoe: https://www.crusoe.ai JB Straubel on X: https://x.com/jbstraubel Redwood Materials on X: https://x.com/RedwoodMat Subscribe to watch more Core Memory videos    / @corememoryvideos   Check out our podcasts    / @corememorypodcast   https://www.corememory.com/podcast Find Ashlee Vance at www.corememory.com   / ashlee.vance   https://x.com/ashleevance CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro 01:05 What Does Redwood Materials Actually Do? 03:26 Why Your Old Phones and Toothbrushes End Up Here 07:18 Can a Dead EV Battery Still Have a Second Life? 11:05 Why Are Thousands of Batteries Sitting in an Open Field? 17:46 The Machine That Bakes a Battery Back Into Metal 26:27 The Recycling Line Nobody Knew How to Build 31:36 Watch a Full EV Pack Disappear Into the Oven 44:51 Why Build This Empire in Nevada, Not California? 50:22 The Used Batteries Now Powering AI Data Centers 57:42 Why Are the Solar Panels Lying Flat? 1:03:52 How Big Can Redwood Actually Get? Find Kylie Robison at https://x.com/kyliebytes   / kylie.robison