The Electric: A Battery CEO on Robots—'They Need a Lot of Power'
Kang Sun is out to bust up a battery industry consensus. For years, battery startups have assumed that to succeed they needed to penetrate at least one of three big industries: electric vehicles, stationary storage or portable electronics.
But Sun, CEO of silicon anode developer Amprius Technologies, notes that the pursuit of those industries hasn’t gone very well: A couple of startups have sold their batteries to a fitness device company or two, along with some Chinese-made smartphone makers. But no startup’s batteries are powering any commercial EV; carmakers, instead of adopting new chemistries, have stayed with “good enough” conventional batteries that cost less. And the market for stationary storage batteries is dominated by cheap, low-end batteries largely made in China.
Sun argues, however, that there is enough business outside those industries to create a healthy company. One vibrant future market, he says, is electric aviation, including drones, high- and low-orbiting satellites, and electric flying taxis. Other markets are artificial intelligence data centers and robots.
“Aviation is a big market, actually. It’s growing very, very fast,” Sun told me. “I went to one country. I cannot mention which one. Their vice president told me they need—this is a small country, very small—three million drones. You can imagine.”
As for robots, he says, “They walk. They lift weight. So they need a lot of power.”
There is an investment boom in all the areas Sun cites: The wars in Russia, Ukraine and Israel have created a surge of interest in military drones. And one of Elon Musk’s latest ventures—the Optimus robot—has ignited a similar rush of investor interest in humanoid robots. Both drones and robots require high energy density to run for a long time, as well as high power to land and move fast—the very needs advanced battery startups can address.
Since drones and robots—unlike cars and electronic devices—have not been around a long time, they by and large do not have the same scale of dug-in incumbent companies with longstanding suppliers. And, unlike the consumer car industry, they are not—at least yet—brutally competitive industries that squeeze every last penny out of suppliers. That leaves room for nimble battery startups—whose batteries are often costly—to break in.
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The Trump administration is encouraging them to do so. For instance, China’s DJI dominates the manufacture of drones and drone components, so the Pentagon has made it a priority to quickly build up U.S. drone-making capacity, creating urgency for the batteries that will power them.
Last week, Fremont, Calif.-based Amprius said it had shipped a new generation of prototype batteries meant for long-distance drone flights to an Airbus subsidiary. Sun said these batteries deliver energy density of 450 watt-hours per kilogram, more than 50% greater than virtually anything else sold commercially. That means Amprius batteries can carry a drone much further.
Sun said the company had separately shipped batteries to multiple drone makers that can deliver an also impressive 370 Wh/kg of energy. These were tweaked to deliver that energy fast, which is needed if you are stopping in midair to take a peek at a Russian platoon, or loitering in the sky for hours or days at a time.
Most drone batteries available today, if they can push out power that fast, offer just 200 Wh/kg of energy, said Spencer Gore, a drone expert.
Amprius, founded in 2008 by a Stanford University professor, went public in 2022 in a reverse merger. As we reported last week, its shares have been on a tear, surging more than 200% since the beginning of June.
Sun said that at first when he became CEO in 2017, he tried to break into all three segments. He found that stationary storage was a nonstarter because the price the battery systems makers were prepared to pay to suppliers was so low “it’s like it’s for free.”
EV makers take too long to test the batteries of new suppliers, he said, and even if Amprius got an EV deal, it would need to scale production dramatically if it wanted to turn a profit, an ultraexpensive proposition. “If your battery factory isn’t making a quarter-million EVs, you’re going to make no money at all,” he said.
As for electronics devices, they are dominated by big companies like Apple and Samsung that have largely used the same suppliers for years, he said. “Do you think Apple is going to use an Amprius battery tomorrow?” Sun said.
But the military is prepared to pay top dollar for drone batteries. For niche military applications, batteries can command $1,500 to $3,000 per kilowatt-hour, far more than the $100/kWh carmakers pay for EV batteries.
However, you still have to think big because drones alone are too small a business for a company that has been focused on EV demand.
Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of silicon anode developer Sila Nanotechnologies, took me through the math. Until last year, apart from dabbling in fitness devices, he was ignoring any market but EVs because he didn’t have any additional production capacity on his pilot line. Now, he is hoping for drone orders.
One thing he has quickly understood is that he would have to sell a lot of drone batteries to make them count on his bottom line: Say he got an order for what a major carmaker would consider a small vehicle line—100,000 cars a year. With a 100 kWh battery in each EV, that would be 10 gigawatt-hours of production, Berdichevsky said.
Then take a typical civilian drone that you might fly for taking aerial photos—it might have 100 watt-hours, or about a thousandth the capacity of an EV battery.
“So if you have an auto contract for a tiny program of 100,000 cars, that will be like a 100 million drones for the same production capacity, which is more than all the drones ever made,” Berdichevsky said. “So while you’re touching these high prices for drone batteries, that’s great, but the volumes are small.”
In other words, if you could actually get a contract to supply batteries for a million EVs a year, you would have a grand slam. If you sold a million drone batteries, you would probably rate that a solid single.
So Sun argues that when you’re tackling aviation, you need to think broader than drones. Since 2018, for instance, Amprius has sold high-power cells to Airbus for surveillance satellites. He is also going after air taxis, known as electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs.
He has also found that stationary storage is a big business, and not monolithic: AI data centers are their own segment, and even the data centers comprise different battery segments.
One requirement of data centers is backup power—batteries that store the electricity gathered by solar panels or wind turbines and deliver it when it’s needed, such as at night, when the sun is no longer shining. The go-to backup batteries are the same cheap, low-end lithium-iron-phosphate batteries—mostly made in China—that utilities use on the grid, and that Tesla employs in its home Powerwalls. No operation in its right mind would use an expensive advanced battery for this purpose.
AI data centers also require surges of power, Sun said: Unlike homes and offices, data centers attempt to avoid any dip in power because their operations are ultraexpensive. That makes them a market for batteries like Amprius’ that can provide a long and fast dollop of power until grid or other base power is restored.
I asked Sun whether all these strands of businesses together—drones, satellites, robots, AI data centers and so on—could comprise a reasonable business. He said they could. “Many of the startups,” he said, “are changing their direction now.”
“Those are the markets Amprius is focusing on,” he said. “I think we placed the right bet a couple of years ago.”