Former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja Joins Redwood Materials as Battery Recycler Pivots to AI Energy Infrastructure
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The man who took Tesla public just joined JB Straubel’s battery startup. It’s no longer just a battery startup.
May 12, 2026 - 8:27 pm
Image by: Steve Jurvetson
TL;DR
Redwood Materials hired former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja, signalling IPO preparation as JB Straubel’s battery recycling startup pivots to powering AI data centres with second-life EV batteries through its Redwood Energy division.
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
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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 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.