Deepak Ahuja, the chief financial officer who took Tesla public in 2010 and served two terms steering its finances through the most volatile period in automotive history, has joined Redwood Materials as CFO. He told TechCrunch it is “too early” to talk about an IPO. Companies that are not thinking about an IPO do not hire the man who took Tesla public.

Ahuja arrives at a company that has changed since its founding. JB Straubel, Tesla’s co-founder and former chief technology officer, started Redwood Materials in 2017 to recycle lithium-ion batteries and recover the critical minerals inside them. The company still does that. It processes more than 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries annually and holds roughly 70 per cent of the US battery recycling market. But the business Ahuja is joining is no longer primarily a recycler. It is becoming an energy infrastructure company that powers AI data centres with the batteries that electric vehicles leave behind.

The reunion

Ahuja and Straubel worked together at Tesla for more than a decade. Ahuja joined as Tesla’s first CFO in 2008, two years before the company went public at 17 dollars a share. He left in 2015, returned in 2017, and departed again in 2019. Straubel joined as Tesla’s fifth employee in 2004, built the battery architecture that defined the company’s technology, and left as CTO the same year Ahuja did. His name is on a majority of Tesla’s patents.

“Knowing JB for the last 18 years, I have huge respect for him as a leader, an engineer and as a thinker,” Ahuja said. The relationship is the reason he took the job. But the timing is the reason it matters. Ahuja is not joining a battery recycling startup. He is joining a company that just restructured its leadership, cut its workforce, and redirected its strategy toward the fastest-growing energy market in the world.

The pivot

In June 2025, Redwood launched Redwood Energy, a division that repurposes retired electric vehicle batteries into grid-scale energy storage systems. The first customer was Crusoe, the AI data centre operator. Together they built the largest second-life battery deployment in the world and the largest microgrid in North America: 12 megawatts and 63 megawatt-hours of storage capacity, powered by large-scale solar and repurposed EV batteries, designed to run autonomous AI compute.

The microgrid has maintained 99.2 per cent operational availability since launch. In March 2026, Crusoe and Redwood expanded the partnership from four to 24 modular data centres, increasing total compute capacity to nearly seven times the original deployment. Redwood plans to deploy 20 gigawatt-hours of grid-scale storage by 2028, which would make it the largest second-life battery storage provider in North America.

The thesis is that the two technology revolutions of the 2020s, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, are connected by the same physical object. US utilities plan to spend 1.4 trillion dollars by 2030 to power the AI boom, and data centres could consume 12 per cent of American electricity by 2028. More than five million EVs are on US roads today. Their batteries hold an estimated 350 gigawatt-hours of energy that will reach end of life in the coming years, with another 150 gigawatt-hours entering the fleet annually. The waste stream from the first revolution is the power source for the second.

The restructuring

Ahuja arrives less than a month after Redwood cut roughly 135 workers, or about 10 per cent of its headcount. Chief operating officer Chris Lister retired. Four senior operational leaders departed in a compressed period, including the vice presidents of integrated supply chain, mechanical engineering, and manufacturing. Five months earlier, the company had trimmed five per cent of staff in a separate round.

Straubel told employees the company had “expanded faster than needed” and said the restructuring was designed to reduce management layers and refocus the business on energy storage. The layoffs came three months after Redwood closed a 425 million dollar Series E round in January 2026, led by Eclipse with participation from Google and Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures. The company raised 350 million dollars in October 2025. It has raised roughly two billion dollars in equity capital and holds a two billion dollar loan commitment from the US Department of Energy.

The pattern, raise capital, restructure leadership, hire a public-company CFO, is not the sequence of a company that is merely optimising operations. Startups racing to curb data centre energy use are attracting capital at a pace that rewards companies with clear paths to scale. Redwood’s restructuring reads like preparation.

The numbers

Redwood is valued at more than six billion dollars. It generated 200 million dollars in run-rate revenue in 2024 across three business lines: battery recycling, which recovers lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper from spent batteries; anode and cathode production, which turns those recovered materials into new battery components; and Redwood Energy, which monetises the batteries that still retain significant capacity before they enter the recycling pipeline.

The company operates a 175-acre campus near Reno, Nevada, and plans a second facility northwest of Charleston, South Carolina. Each site is designed for 100 gigawatt-hours of electrode material production capacity, enough to supply more than one million electric vehicles per plant. The combined capital cost is approximately seven billion dollars, with the DOE loan underwriting the Nevada expansion.

Batteries remain the bottleneck for technology breakthroughs across sectors, from electric vehicles to grid storage to consumer electronics. Redwood sits at the intersection of supply and demand. It controls the materials going into new batteries and the energy coming out of old ones. The vertical integration is what makes the business defensible and what makes it attractive to a CFO who understands what public markets value.

The signal

Ahuja’s appointment is the clearest indication yet that Straubel is building toward a public offering. Amazon-backed nuclear startup X-energy has already filed for an IPO, and the broader energy infrastructure category is producing the strongest pipeline of public offerings since the cleantech boom of 2007. Redwood’s combination of hardware assets, government backing, and a new revenue stream tied to AI infrastructure positions it in the category of companies that public markets are currently willing to pay a premium for.

Straubel still sits on Tesla’s board, which means the co-founder of the company that proved electric vehicles could be a mass market business is simultaneously building the company that captures value from those vehicles at end of life and redirects it into AI. Nvidia has committed more than 40 billion dollars in AI equity bets in 2026, and its venture arm’s investment in Redwood signals that the chipmaker sees energy storage as part of the AI infrastructure stack, not adjacent to it.

Ahuja said it is too early to discuss an IPO. He also said his respect for Straubel is the reason he joined. Both statements can be true without either being the whole story. The man who built Tesla’s financial architecture has joined a company that recycles the batteries Tesla made, repurposes them to power the data centres that run AI, and is valued at six billion dollars with a two billion dollar federal loan and investors that include Google and Nvidia. The company that started by taking apart the batteries from the electric vehicle revolution is now assembling the energy infrastructure for the one that comes next.