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The all-American EV startup is cutting costs to survive.

America’s most interesting electric-vehicle company is about to have the defining year of its life.
On Wednesday, the company reported that it lost $1.58 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, bringing its net annual losses to $5.4 billion. It announced that it is laying off about 10% of its salaried employees, but — at the same time — promised that it has a plan to achieve a small profit by the end of this year.
Rivian does not seem to be in trouble — not quite yet, at least. But the earnings made clear what electric-vehicle observers have known for a long time: Either the company will emerge from this year poised to be a winner in the EV transition, or it will find itself up against the wall.
That’s partially because Rivian has a stomach-turning number of corporate milestones coming up. Over the next 11 months, it plans to unveil an entirely new line of vehicles, shut down its factory for several weeks for cost-saving upgrades, break ground on a new $5 billion facility in Georgia, and — most importantly — turn a profit for the first time. It also expects to manufacture and deliver roughly another 60,000 vehicles to customers.
Any one of these goals would be difficult to achieve in any environment. But Rivian is going to have to execute all of them during a time defined by “economic and geopolitical uncertainties” and especially high interest rates, its CEO R.J. Scaringe told investors on Wednesday. Since 2021, Rivian’s once robust stockpile of cash has been cut in half to about $7 billion; at its current burn rate, the company will run out of money in a little more than two years.
Although Rivian’s situation is dire, it’s not experiencing anything out of the ordinary. As I’ve written before, the electric truck maker is crossing what commentators sometimes call “the EV valley of death.” This is the challenging point in a company’s life cycle where it has developed a product and scaled it up to production — thereby raising its operating expenses to eye-watering levels — but where its revenue has not yet increased too.
During this vulnerable period, a company essentially burns through its cash on hand in the hope that more customers and serious revenue will soon show up. If those customers don’t arrive, then it either needs to raise more cash … or it runs out of money and goes bankrupt.
It’s a frightening time, but once a company crosses the valley of death, it can reach an idyll. Not so long ago, Tesla found itself in something like Rivian’s position as it prepared to launch the Model 3. Seven years later, it is the most valuable automaker in the world.
Once Rivian’s revenue exceeds its costs, its problems will get easier, or at least more straightforward: Instead of fighting for its survival and watching its cash reserves dwindle, Scaringe will be able to make more strategic trade-offs. Should the company cut costs to expand its profit margin and reward investors, or should it pass the savings along to customers in the form of lower prices, thus growing its market share? Scaringe can’t make these types of decisions until his firm is safely out of the valley.
Claire McDonough, Rivian’s chief financial officer and a former J.P. Morgan director, has a plan for crossing that canyon — an aptly if strangely named “bridge to profitability” that it will attempt to build this year. Rivian’s survival, she said, will depend above all on cutting the unit costs of producing its vehicles, including by using fewer materials to make every car. Other savings will come from making more vehicles faster. That’s what makes the shutdown plan, though it might seem extreme, worth it; McDonough said those improvements alone will get the company about 80% of the way to profitability.
Another 15% will come from marketing more “software-enabled products” to Rivian drivers and by selling air-pollution credits to other carmakers, whose vehicles are not as climate-friendly. This is a tried-and-true technique; Tesla first turned a profit in 2021 by selling regulatory credits needed to comply with federal and California state-level rules to other, dirtier automakers. But that same year, Tesla also debuted an entirely new vehicle: the Model Y crossover, which quickly became its top seller in the United States. Tesla, in other words, finally started to make money by cutting costs, finding new revenue sources, and releasing new products.
New products, however, are becoming a weak point for Rivian. The company says that high interest rates will keep demand for its vehicles flat this year. It expects to make about 60,000 of them, about 20,000 fewer than what it had once anticipated. The Rivian R1S, a three-row S.U.V., has become the company’s flagship; it is selling better and is cheaper to manufacture than Rivian’s pickup, the R1T. It also costs at least $75,000, or nearly $600 a month to lease. The highest-tier models can cost $99,000. Turns out, it’s difficult to sell a lot of $70,000 trucks when even the cheapest new-car loans hover around 6%.
Rivian once had a first-to-market advantage in the electric three-row SUV market, but that may be fizzling out, too. Kia is now selling its own all-electric three-row SUV, the EV9, for $18,000 less than the R1S; in fact, the Kia EV9’s most expensive trim costs $76,000, which is only slightly more than the cheapest R1S. The Kia SUV can also charge faster than the Rivian under ideal conditions. It remains an open question how many rich suburbanites are still interested in buying Rivians, especially now that the Tesla Cybertruck and Ford F-150 Lightning are competing directly with Rivian’s pickup truck.
The company’s hopes, in other words, rest on its next product line: the R2, which it will launch on March 7. We know almost nothing about the R2 line, except that it will probably include an SUV, that it will go on sale in 2026, and that it will fall somewhere in the $45,000 to $55,000 price range. (The median new car transaction in the United States now costs $48,200.) Last year, Scaringe told me that the R2’s timing was perfect because it would fit “beautifully with what we see as this big shift” in the American EV market. In today’s market, he said, “a lot of people ask themselves, Am I gonna get an electric car? Well maybe the next one.” He better hope they’ll start buying that next one in 2026.
Even if they do, Rivian may still have to confront the problem that Tesla has changed the EV market before Rivian could get there. When the first Tesla Model 3s were delivered in 2017, the sedan was instantly one of the best EVs on the market — because it was one of the only EVs on the market. Now every automaker in the world has plans to compete at the Model 3’s price point.
Rivian’s fortunes don’t rest entirely on American consumers; it also sells vans to commercial fleet operators, as well as delivery trucks to Amazon. (Amazon owns about 17% of Rivian.) But that business can be lumpy. Rivian’s vehicle growth slowed down last quarter, for instance, almost entirely because of a near pause in sales to Amazon, which sets up fewer new vehicles in the fourth quarter. If Amazon is willing to bail out Rivian, in other words, it’s not yet clear in the data.
None of this is to say that the company’s outlook is dire. Rivian was always going to find itself at a moment like this, when its expenses exceeded its revenue by such a large amount. The automaker already has devoted fans, and many people — myself included — are interested in the R2 as a potential first EV purchase.
And the company has shown that it can make strides in a single year. Twelve months ago, I had never seen a Rivian on the road before; today, one is regularly parked on my block. The company rocketed from a standing start to become the No. 5 best-selling electric car brand in America last year. What the company has done so far is impressive. But now it must prove that it can be great.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to correctly reflect Rivian's cash burn rate.
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Current conditions: The fast-moving Palos Fire blazed through 17 acres in Los Angeles’ La Habra Heights, injuring two • Heavy rain in São Paulo collapsed a dilapidated building, killing six • The heat index in the Mississippi Valley is topping 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
Two weeks after accusing data center opponents of wanting “to end up being backwards and poor,” President Donald Trump has landed on a new defense of the artificial intelligence buildout. It’s a lot like his old one for abdicating on the federal government’s responsibility to deal with climate-changing emissions. Essentially, it boils down to: My critics are making it all up. “It’s a hoax,” Trump told Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the five-minute call the executive put on speaker on stage at a conference Monday in Los Angeles. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world. That’s not going to happen.” He later posted on his Truth Social platform: “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Three-quarters of Americans are now opposed to data centers in their backyards, according to Heatmap Pro’s poll from last month. But Trump has recently bucked with some populist positions on technology that have cross-partisan appeal. While law-and-order Republicans in red states are now turning against the Flock cameras that watch for petty crime, Trump defended the technology in a recent Air Force One chat with reporters. “Trump deserves more respect for his anti-slopulist instincts,” Peter Meijer, a former Republican member of Congress who voted to impeach Trump during his previous administration, wrote in a post on X.
Nvidia’s emissions, meanwhile, appear to be soaring. A new Greenpeace analysis of Nvidia’s own climate reports by the pro-renewables analyst Ketan Joshi found that emissions relating to the supply chain for chip manufacturing soared by 725% since 2020, adding nearly 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

You wouldn’t believe some of the conditions I have heard placed on owners of hydroelectric dams seeking to relicense major clean power projects. There are obvious demands from regulators for things like new infrastructure to help migrating fish pass down a river. Then there are the less obvious, such as building an amphitheater for Boy Scouts or paving new roads far from a dam or its water source. In what the trade group called a first-of-its-kind analysis, the National Hydropower Association reviewed more than 5,000 mandatory conditions across 4,819 licensing documents filed between 1980 and 2026 in 46 states. Dam owners would need to agree to the legally binding requirements, imposed by either state or federal agencies, before a final operating license could be issued. Compared to earlier licenses, hydropower plants today “carry roughly 10 times as many mandatory conditions,” the trade association wrote in its report. “To make matters worse, many conditions are unrelated to energy production and are essentially ‘wish list’ items that hydropower producers are asked to fund, ranging from road construction unrelated to the projects to building fish passage far beyond where the fish actually are (or even could be),” the organization said. Over the next decade, 348 hydropower permits representing 12 gigawatts of capacity are due for relicensing. Many of those facilities are small, and the trend recently has been for companies to simply surrender their licenses and close up shop rather than make costly renovations.
“I urge anyone who cares about reliable, affordable power to read this groundbreaking study,” Malcolm Woolf, NHA’s top executive, said in a statement. “Hydropower, a superhero of the grid and an American icon of energy production, is at great risk due to a broken regulatory framework. Relicensing an existing hydropower facility often takes decades and costs millions of dollars. If these facilities go away, so does the affordable power they produce, the good jobs they create, and the critical infrastructure and ecosystem care they provide.”
Back in May, I told you that South Korea — arguably the most competent builder of atomic power reactors in the democratic world — was “coming to America’s nuclear rescue.” Last week, we discussed the possibility of Seoul’s state-owned nuclear company building reactors in the U.S. as part of a trade pact with the Trump administration. Now we have a clearer picture of where those negotiations may be going. On Tuesday, The Korea Economic Daily reported that South Korea is seeking a roughly 15% stake in Westinghouse, the maker of America’s flagship nuclear reactor, and a seat on its board as part of any deal with Washington. The move, the newspaper noted, is designed to “turn a U.S. request for Korean capital into a strategic foothold in America’s nuclear buildouts.” Ownership by one of America’s closest East Asian allies would be nothing new for Westinghouse, which was owned in the mid 2000s by the Japanese industrial giant Toshiba. Today Westinghouse is a privately held joint venture between the publicly traded investment behemoth Brookfield Asset Management and the Canadian uranium miner Cameco, but the company filed confidential paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission in July as a first step toward going public on the stock market.
The market only appears to be expanding. Global nuclear capacity could more than triple by 2060, according to this week’s latest forecast from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations affiliate that oversees nuclear technologies worldwide.
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Spend a few minutes scrolling through a comedy fan’s TikTok stream and you’ll find skits playing to the same memetic trope, an anthropomorphized caricature of an incompetent, mistake-prone AI agent guzzling and spilling lots of water. It’s no wonder the joke has already become hack. More than three-quarters of Americans are at least somewhat concerned about the environmental impact of AI, and half are extremely or very concerned, according to data from the latest annual poll from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. In every case, self-identified Democrats are more concerned about environmental issues than Republicans. While 40% of Democrats expressed concern over the environmental impacts of cryptocurrency, just 18% of Republicans said the same. With meat, the ration is 42% to 21%. With air travel, it's Democrats at 38% and Republicans at 17%. But interests converge slightly more on data centers, with 65% of Democrats and 42% Republicans extremely or very concerned about the environmental impacts of AI.
In theory, the late 20th century liberalization of America’s electricity markets should have put a premium on transmission companies building new arteries in the system. In practice, the high cost and grave risk of taking on dozens, sometimes droves, of landowners for right of way to build a power line that stretches hundreds of miles across multiple regional grids makes the task almost impossible, particularly in markets where a power company can’t offset the cost of new lines with other sources of revenue such as generation or power sales. A new report by the Center for Public Enterprise has concluded that “only the federal government can intervene to sew together this national macrogrid by bridging the jurisdictional divides between utilities and regions, instituting planning pipelines with access to finance and cost recovery, and fixing interconnection procedures.” As of yet, that looks unlikely beyond the increased focus on regional planning under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 1920. The rule is facing legal challenges that aren’t expected to be resolved until next year, according to Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative.
When I visited Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ headquarters in Massachusetts earlier this summer, I saw how much progress the company had made toward building what could be the world’s first power-producing fusion reactor, called SPARC. To work, the interior of the torus-shaped, doughnut-like reactor needs to be very cold so magnets can pick up on the contrast in temperatures with the extremely hot plasma fusing together. That’s where the cryogenics come in. The facility’s cryogenics equipment is now up and running, the company said on Wednesday, marking yet another milestone toward next year’s anticipated start up. “That temperature, a few degrees above absolute zero, is what’ll enable our magnets to bottle up a superhot cloud of charged particles called a plasma so fusion can occur,” Adam Weiner, the director of cryogenics at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, said in a statement.
Rob talks with climate and data expert Hannah Ritchie about her new platform, U.S. Energy Data.
America has some of the world’s best data about its own internal energy, industrial economy, and carbon emissions. That’s thanks to a federal agency called the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which painstakingly collects and updates the data every week.
But EIA data can be hard to access — and even harder to share and understand. A new project aims to change that. U.S. Energy Data takes federal energy data and repackages it, helping amateurs and experts understand the power grid, liquid fuels, and more. It is now the easiest way to make and share charts with federal energy data.
On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and writer who advised and prototyped US Energy Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the World and Clearing the Air, as well as a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and the deputy editor at Our World in Data. Rob and Hannah discuss how the platform came together, what makes it such a valuable resource, and what we can learn from it about the state of the energy transition.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: One thing that I so appreciate about your work, incluidng two books about climate change and Our World in Data, is that it is grounded, as it says in the title, in data. And that means that unlike those of us who are maybe in the news cycle every day and following the vagaries of policy moving one way and then moving the other way, having a framework through which to understand the world, I think a data-driven framework especially, means that you can update more slowly. And at least when you update your worldview, it’s grounded in a change which is surprising you or important, or that’s standing out, you know, in the real world, and not just in the kind of discursive or political world that we tend to cover.
At the risk of asking a very large question, how are you feeling about global decarbonization at the moment? As someone who works in the data, who looks at the data, what do you think hasn’t been noticed at the moment? I have a candidate here, but I’m curious what you think as well.
Hannah Ritchie: I think that in terms of global decarbonization, I’m still pretty optimistic. And I think one of the key distinctions there, I think when it comes to these discussions, we do naturally focus on the U.S.. And I think decarbonization in the U.S. has gone slowly, and too slowly, and has faced setbacks. And I think there is the temptation to extrapolate that view and say, well, the world is not doing well on decarbonization. And I don’t think that’s correct. I think, to not be too much of a centrist on this, we’re not going as fast as I would like, or what we frame as what we should need to be. But I do actually think that things are moving pretty quickly and accelerating in other parts of the world.
And I think the challenge there is, I think people are not saying that, yes, China is moving very quickly on this. But a key point there is, if you look at other countries, low- and middle-income countries across Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia, many of those countries are also moving fast. And I think that’s underappreciated. And I think they’re moving fast because the energy transition and electrification and decarbonization just increasingly makes economic sense to do so.
So I guess the trade-off between increasing energy services for people — for which, in many low- and middle-income countries, that’s just a core part of development. And a key priority is no longer incompatible with also doing that in a relatively low-carbon way, and I think that’s a really key, underappreciated point, and you start to see that in these annual updates of what happened in the last year, and I think you miss it if you’re only looking at, you know, the headline from yesterday and the headline from today.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Previously on Shift Key: Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures joined us to discuss permitting reform
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Google, Nvidia, and Emerald AI are founding members.
Nvidia, Google, and data center software startup Emerald AI are teaming up to lead the AI Energy Management Alliance, a trade group dedicated to promoting flexible load for AI data centers, the organizations announced on Wednesday.
“There are a lot of AI trade associations, data center trade associations, energy trade associations. This is the only one that is laser focused on flexible AI data centers,” Varun Sivaram, founder and chief executive of Emerald AI, told reporters in a briefing earlier in the week.
The group represents the evolution of an older trade association, the Advanced Energy Management Alliance, which was founded in 2014 and advocated for demand response for large electricity customers. Energy policy veteran Frank Lacey will lead the reconstituted group, which will also include other energy and AI heavyweights among its members, such as Anthropic, NRG, and Constellation Energy.
The pursuit of policies and technologies that can enable data centers to reduce their draw on the grid during moments of peak demand has been something of a holy grail for energy policy practitioners and hyperscalers like Google. That’s because much of the cost of building out and maintaining the grid — including greenhouse gas emitting gas-fired powered plants — is for meeting those peak hours.
“The savings to consumers if we had effective flexibility is enormous,” Abraham Silverman, former general counsel at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and assistant research scholar with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute at Johns Hopkins University, told me. (He is not involved with the alliance.) “It’s when you get up to the hottest or coldest day of the year that you need that extra transmission line or need to build a new one,” which then drives up costs for everyone, Silverman said.
A recent Johns Hopkins analysis of the grid operator PJM Interconnection, which covers large portions of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, found that “requiring data centers to accept occasional power interruptions saves over $15 billion per year.”
State and local regulators have shown openness to a variety of approaches that could get data centers on the grid faster while minimizing impact on the grid. “Just about every state has some either legislative or regulatory process for looking at this,” Silverman said.
The case for flexibility picked up steam last year thanks to an academic paper co-authored by energy systems expert Tyler Norris, who at the time was a researcher at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and is now Google’s head of energy market innovation. Norris argued that much of AI data center electricity demand could be served by the existing grid with modest flexibility.
“The limiting factor for new digital infrastructure isn't capital or silicon; it's power,” Norris told the reporters during the briefing. “But the biggest near-term barrier isn't a lack of electricity. Multiple studies have found that if new loads are able to reduce their draw from the grid for a small fraction of the year — less than 100 hours during peak periods — we can add dozens of gigawatts of new load to the existing U.S. power system.”
Google says it has 1 gigawatt of demand flexibility integrated into its existing utility contracts, while Emerald, which recently fetched a valuation of just over $1 billion, is working on a 100-megawatt data center with Digital Realty and Nvidia in Virginia. That facility “is intended to demonstrate a model that future AI factories around the world can adopt,” Josh Parker, the head of sustainability at Nvidia, told reporters on the call.
“What we want to do is to better utilize that infrastructure,” Parker added. “Every watt wasted is a watt that could have been used to generate tokens, which could lead to life-saving treatments, or economic productivity, or even energy efficiency in other sectors that dramatically improve our sustainability outcomes.”
The effort is especially noteworthy because it explicitly seeks to make building data centers easier amidst mounting and diffuse skepticism from the communities that may host them and the public as a whole. Part of the case for flexible load is to solve for the mounting utility bills widely predicted to accompany AI’s expansion.
“The real goal,” Sivaram said, is “more community-friendly and grid-friendly data centers — data centers that are good grid citizens all across the country.”
Concern over the energy system’s ability to meet the demand from AI has reached the federal level. In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission asked the six large independent power markets to come up with reforms to help protect the grid and consumers from the huge predicted rise in demand from data centers. Those include coming up with “new transmission services to reflect large load flexibility,” as FERC Chair Laura Swett put it. A trade group focused on flexibility could push forward these conversations in a coordinated way, ideally bringing together state and federal regulators, Silverman told me.
Right now, any effort to reform data center interconnection tends to ping pong back and forth between states, the federal government, and the regional transmission organizations, with major players trying to have their case heard at whatever level they think will be most favorable to their interests. For example, Microsoft is contesting a Virginia rule over data center cost allocation, claiming it stands to get in the way of federal rules.
“This new trade association could be very helpful in bringing together the companies for whom flexibility is a competitive strength and give them a voice,” Silverman told me.