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Sparks

Uncle Sam Is Helping Americans Buy 675 Electric Cars a Day

New Treasury data just dropped.

An EV charger.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Earlier this week, I was thinking to myself, how are we going to know how many people are actually taking advantage of the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act?

When I put the question out on Twitter — I mean, X — I heard from Sam Hughes, a researcher inside the Treasury who pointed me to a section of the department’s website that contains data on tax credits by year. The problem is, it hasn’t been updated since 2020. But then today, as if to answer my prayers, I received a taste of the data I was looking for in my inbox.

A Treasury official shared that the IRS has received notices from car sellers indicating they sold more than 25,000 tax credit-eligible vehicles between January 1 and February 6. That’s an average of more than 675 EVs sold at a government-sponsored discount per day.

To put that in perspective, about 1.08 million cars were sold in total in the month of January, according to Cox Automotive, or about 34,840 per day. So the tax credit-supported EVs were only about 2% of the total cars sold.

But 25,000 discounted EVs is nothing to scoff at — especially since starting January 1, two big changes were made to the tax credit that made it both harder and easier for Americans to get them.

First, new rules that limit what countries the components in eligible EVs are allowed to come from had the effect of disqualifying a lot of EVs from the tax credit. As of today, only 22 models from Chevy, Ford, Rivian, Tesla, and Volkswagen qualify, according to the Department of Energy. Last year, there were 35 models.

But at the same time, car buyers were given the option to transfer the tax credit to their dealer at the point of sale. That meant the dealer could take the $7,500 discount for new EVs, or $4,000 for used EVs, directly off the price of the car. Buyers no longer have to worry about whether or not they will owe $7,500 in taxes at the end of the year, or wait around for their tax return, to get that money back.

The Treasury said it has paid approximately $135 million in advance payments to dealers for about 19,000 of the EVs sold this year.

So even with fewer options available, buyers are still taking advantage of the new instant rebate and finding vehicles that work for them. The vast majority of the EVs sold — more than 22,000 — were new cars, while just over 3,000 were used EVs.

One disheartening stat included in the data is that some 11,000 dealerships have registered with the IRS to sell tax credit-eligible vehicles. As of last year, there were just over 16,800 dealerships in the country, according to the National Automobile Dealerships Association, so that means only about 65% of dealerships can offer customers the EV tax credit. Many dealers are not yet on board with the electric revolution. They take longer to sell and require less maintenance, cutting into profits.

The Treasury official said the department was trying to increase registrations via trade association partners, webinars, and conferences.

This smidgeon of data is not enough to assess how well the tax credits are working, and I hope that after tax day, the agency releases similar information about how many people claimed other IRA-related tax credits last year.

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Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis that

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

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