Battery recycling company Redwood Materials on Monday announced the appointment of Deepak Ahuja as its chief financial officer.
Redwood, founded in 2017 by CEO JB Straubel - who is also a co-founder and director of Tesla - focuses on recovering key battery metals and deploying energy storage systems. The company recovers lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper through recycling processes, and it also supplies energy storage solutions used to provide grid services and to power data centers.
The hire comes as Redwood moves to expand supplies of critical minerals in response to rising energy demand tied to the rapid expansion of AI data centers. The company has identified recycled critical minerals and energy storage as core elements of its growth strategy.
Ahuja previously served as chief financial officer at Tesla during two separate periods before leaving that role in 2019. After his time at Tesla, he became chief financial officer at Verily Life Sciences and later took on the position of chief business and financial officer at Zipline, a company focused on drone delivery and logistics.
The announcement did not provide additional operational or financial details about how Redwood plans to scale mineral supplies or the specific responsibilities and timeline associated with Ahuja's new role. The company has said it both recovers critical battery metals through recycling and deploys storage systems that can serve grids and data center power needs.
Context and implications
Redwood's appointment of a finance executive with experience across automotive, life sciences and logistics signals a focus on aligning capital and business strategy with its recycling and energy storage objectives. The company's stated emphasis on critical minerals and grid and data center power applications places it at the intersection of materials recovery and infrastructure for high-demand computing environments.
What the announcement does not disclose
- No financial terms of Ahuja's employment were disclosed.
- The company did not provide a detailed roadmap for scaling recycled mineral supplies.
- There were no specifics on how storage deployments will be funded or phased.