1. Redwood Materials, a battery recycler and cathode-maker, has announced job cuts affecting around 5% of its workforce (approximately 60 employees).
2. The company, founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel in 2017, focuses on recycling discarded materials like cobalt, nickel, and lithium from battery production waste and consumer electronics, selling these extracted materials back to customers such as Panasonic.
3. Redwood has expanded its business to include the use of old EV batteries in energy storage products, particularly for power-hungry AI data centers, and had stockpiled more than 1 gigawatt-hour's worth of batteries by June 2022. The company recently secured a $350 million investment, boosting its valuation to around $6 billion.