Former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja has joined Redwood Materials as the battery recycler shifts its focus to AI-driven energy infrastructure.

      **TL;DR** Redwood Materials has appointed Deepak Ahuja, former CFO of Tesla, as its new CFO, indicating preparations for an IPO as JB Straubel’s battery recycling firm shifts focus to supplying AI data centers with second-life electric vehicle batteries through its Redwood Energy division.

      Deepak Ahuja, who was instrumental in taking Tesla public in 2010 and managed its finances during a tumultuous time in the automotive industry, has joined Redwood Materials as CFO. He indicated to TechCrunch that it is “too early” to discuss an IPO, suggesting that hiring someone with Ahuja's experience is usually a sign of IPO readiness.

      Ahuja comes to a company that has evolved significantly since its inception. JB Straubel, Tesla's co-founder and former CTO, established Redwood Materials in 2017 to recycle lithium-ion batteries and recover valuable minerals. While the company continues this mission, it is now expanding into energy solutions, supplying AI data centers with used EV batteries.

      **The Reunion**

      Ahuja and Straubel collaborated at Tesla for over ten years. Ahuja began as Tesla’s first CFO in 2008, two years before its public offering, and left in 2015, returned in 2017, and departed again in 2019. Straubel was Tesla's fifth employee in 2004 and developed the battery architecture that became the foundation of Tesla's technology, departing as CTO in the same year as Ahuja. His name appears on many Tesla patents.

      Ahuja expressed his admiration for Straubel’s leadership and engineering expertise, stating that it influenced his decision to join Redwood Materials. The timing of his arrival is crucial, as he is not just joining a battery recycling startup but a company that has recently restructured its leadership and focused its strategy on the rapidly growing energy market.

      **The Pivot**

      In June 2025, Redwood introduced Redwood Energy, a division that converts retired electric vehicle batteries into large-scale energy storage systems. Its initial customer, Crusoe, is an operator of AI data centers, and together they created the world’s largest second-life battery deployment, as well as the largest microgrid in North America, featuring a capacity of 12 megawatts and 63 megawatt-hours. This microgrid has achieved 99.2% operational availability since its inception.

      In March 2026, Redwood expanded its partnership with Crusoe from four to 24 modular data centers, ramping up compute capacity nearly sevenfold. The company aims to deploy 20 gigawatt-hours of grid-scale storage by 2028, positioning itself as the biggest second-life battery storage provider in North America.

      Both electric vehicles and artificial intelligence are seen as interconnected by the same battery technology. US utilities are projected to invest $1.4 trillion by 2030 to support the AI industry, potentially leading data centers to account for 12% of national electricity consumption by 2028. Currently, over five million EVs are on US roads, with their batteries holding around 350 gigawatt-hours of energy that will reach the end of their life soon, alongside an additional 150 gigawatt-hours added each year. Thus, the waste from the first revolution provides power for the second.

      **The Restructuring**

      Ahuja’s arrival follows Redwood’s recent workforce reduction of roughly 135 employees, or about 10% of its total staff. Additionally, Chief Operating Officer Chris Lister stepped down, and several other senior leaders left in quick succession. This came five months after a prior 5% staff reduction.

      Straubel indicated that the company had "expanded faster than necessary," and the restructuring aimed to simplify management layers and refocus on energy storage. The layoffs occurred three months after Redwood secured a $425 million Series E funding round in January 2026, led by Eclipse with inputs from Google and Nvidia’s NVentures. The company had previously raised $350 million in October 2025, totaling about $2 billion in equity capital and an additional $2 billion loan commitment from the US Department of Energy.

      The sequence of capital raising, leadership restructuring, and hiring a CFO with public company experience is not typical of a company merely seeking operational efficiency. Startups aiming to reduce energy consumption in data centers are attracting investment rapidly, favoring firms with clear scaling pathways. Redwood's restructuring suggests it is preparing for future growth.

      **The Numbers**

      Redwood is valued at over $6 billion and reported $200 million in revenue for 2024 across three business segments: battery recycling, recovering materials like lithium and cobalt from spent batteries; producing anodes and cathodes; and Redwood Energy, which yields revenue from batteries that still have substantial capacity before recycling.

      The firm operates a 175-acre facility near Reno, Nevada and plans to establish a site northwest of Charleston, South Carolina. Each location aims for 100 gigawatt-hours of production capacity, sufficient to supply over a million electric