For years, electric vehicle makers were known mostly for burning cash. That may be changing. According to The Information, US EV makers are “starting to rake in the big dough,” and the money isn’t only going to Tesla. The publication says the cash is showing up “in places few were looking.”
The Information’s full breakdown is paywalled, so I won’t guess at its specific numbers. The direction is still worth paying attention to. An industry everyone wrote off as a money pit is finding real revenue, and that matters well beyond cars.
Why this is surprising
The past year was rough for US EVs. In 2025, Washington ended the $7,500 federal consumer tax credit and effectively wiped out the fuel-economy penalties that used to make regulatory credit sales so profitable. Many analysts expected a long, painful stretch for every EV maker that wasn’t Tesla.
So when The Information calls this cash “unexpected,” it’s pointing at a real gap between what the market expected and what’s happening on the books. When an industry loses its subsidies and starts making money anyway, the money is usually coming from somewhere other than the obvious source.
My read: follow the batteries, and the AI build-out
The Information doesn’t spell out the source in what it has published openly. Still, one shift stands out across the sector, and it ties straight back to AI.
EV companies spent billions building battery supply chains, factories, and software teams. Those assets now have buyers outside the car market:
- Grid and data center storage. AI data centers need huge amounts of steady power, and battery storage helps smooth out demand and bring new capacity online faster. Tesla’s energy business has been one of its bright spots, and other automakers have talked openly about pointing battery capacity at stationary storage.
- Software and autonomy. Driver-assistance and self-driving stacks are AI products at heart. They create recurring revenue and data that hardware sales alone never could.
- Licensing and partnerships. Charging networks, platform deals, and technology licensing let smaller players earn money from what they’ve built without selling more cars.
That’s my analysis, not The Information’s reporting. But it would explain why the money is turning up “in places few were looking.”
The Future Cast: 2027 to 2029
If this trend holds, here’s what I expect over the next one to three years:
- EV makers start to look more like energy and AI infrastructure companies. The car becomes one product among several, and investors start valuing the battery and software arms separately.
- AI power demand becomes a lifeline for battery factories. Plants built for car demand that never fully arrived could find steady customers in hyperscalers and utilities.
- Consolidation speeds up. Companies that found these new revenue streams will have the cash to buy rivals that didn’t.
- The “EV winter” story gets rewritten. Car sales might stay soft while the companies themselves get financially healthier.
One caution: forecasts about EVs have a poor track record. Both the boom predictions of 2021 and the doom predictions of 2025 overshot. Treat any single quarter of good news as a signal to watch, not proof the turnaround is here.
What practitioners and businesses should do
- If you build AI infrastructure: add EV makers and their battery arms to your list of power and storage vendors. They’re hungry for new customers and may have room to negotiate.
- If you work in autonomy or applied AI: watch where these companies spend their new cash. Software and data teams are likely to get it first.
- If you invest: look past unit sales. Check segment reporting for energy, software, and services revenue, because that’s where the surprise probably lives.
- If you run strategy anywhere: take the general lesson: assets built for one market can become valuable in the next one. The AI power crunch is pulling in partners from industries nobody had on their list.
The bigger story here isn’t about cars. AI’s appetite for power and compute is reaching into industries that seemed unrelated a couple of years ago, and the EV sector may be the latest one it pulls in. For the specific numbers and companies behind the cash, see The Information’s full report in its EV newsletter, The Electric.