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The electric vehicle company Rivian is known for products that are, well, large: pickup trucks, SUVs, and delivery vans. But for the past three years, it has been stealthily designing the technology platform for a slew of much smaller, yet-to-be-revealed electric vehicles — think bikes, scooters, and golf carts. Today, Rivian officially spun off that project into its own company, called Also, while … also … announcing that the new venture had raised a $105 million Series B funding round.
The name Also, the company’s CEO Chris Yu told me, points to the idea that owning a car and owning a smaller EV are not mutually exclusive — rather, it’s about finding the right tool for the job. “If I’m taking my family to Yosemite on the weekend, I want to use my Rivian R1S, but for my daily school runs, probably not. That’s not the most efficient or enjoyable way to do it,” Yu told me. In the U.S. about 80% of all car trips are 15 miles or less, and over 50% of are less than six miles. The goal of Also, Yu said, is for smaller EV’s — or “micromobility solutions” — to replace cars for those shorter daily excursions.
Prior to his new role, Yu worked as vice president on Rivian’s “Future Programs” team, working to incubate Also alongside Rivian’s CEO RJ Scaringe, who will now serve as the new company’s board chair while continuing to lead Rivian. The incumbent EV-automaker participated in Also’s Series B alongside the lead investor, venture capital firm Eclipse, and will maintain a minority ownership stake in it.
Also’s flagship product is set to launch in the U.S. and Europe early next year, and will be followed by consumer and commercial products for the Asian and South American markets, though the company hasn’t yet said what these products will be. In the U.S., electric scooters and e-bikes have taken off in cities, while in some suburban areas, beach towns and retirement communities, golf carts are ubiquitous. Across much of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, three-wheelers such as rickshaws and mototaxis are everywhere, and are increasingly being electrified.
But there’s still a long way to go. “The rate of electrification for small vehicles across the world is far, far lower than cars, like low single digit percent,” Yu told me. He said that what will set Also apart from existing offerings — besides electrification, of course — is the scale the company aims to operate at and its intuitive technology platform.
Also is developing everything in-house, from the motors to the software, which Yu said will lead to the type of seamless, personalized user experiences that customers have come to expect from newer EVs such as Rivians or Teslas. Think “walking up to your vehicle and having it automatically know that it’s you and unlocking,” Yu told me, or “adjusting to your profiles, your media plays, what you were last playing, etc.” Making something like an e-bike or electric golf cart “smarter,” Yu explained, could also help with issues such as security — potentially making Also’s TBD products less vulnerable to theft — or safety, such as gauging if someone is riding at a dangerous speed for the area or in an inappropriate zone.
Even with this type of advanced technology integration, Yu claimed that the company’s products will be cost competitive with what’s on the market today due to the scale that Also aims to achieve. Yu’s hope is that taking advantage of Rivian’s existing technologies and retail footprint will help.
Whatever form factor Also’s small EVs take, Yu told me they will embody Rivian’s adventurous spirit, “weaving in some of what people aspire to do and look forward to doing, whether it’s on a weekend or summer vacations,” he explained. So will this look like an off-roading golf cart? A smarter electric mountain bike? A scooter that also rips on the backroads? We’ll have to wait until next year to see.
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Microsoft is canceling data center leases, according to a Wall Street analyst.
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing another TD Cowen shock.
The whole spectrum of companies connected to artificial intelligence — the companies that design the chips, that supply the power, that make the generation equipment — shuddered Wednesday when the brokerage released another note from analysts pointing to evidence that Microsoft was giving up on its data center leases.
“Microsoft has both (1) walked away from +2GW of capacity in both the U.S. and Europe in the last six months that was in process to be leased, and (2) has both deferred and canceled existing data center leases in both the U.S. and Europe in the last month,” the analysts wrote.
Microsoft is one of the biggest players in the artificial intelligence industry, with its near-$14 billion investment in OpenAI and acommitment to spend $80 billion on data center capacity this year.
The company is pulling back, the TD Cowen analysts said, because it had decided not to support incremental increases in training workloads for OpenAI models. Shares in Nvidia, the chip designer that’s become one of the most valuable companies in the world on the back of optimism about artificial intelligence, are down 7% since market close Tuesday, while shares in the power companies Vistra and Constellation are down 9% and 7% respectively. GE Vernova, which makes turbines for gas-fired power plants, is down 9%.
Much of the power industry saw huge increases in their stock prices in 2024, as investors bet on increased demand for electricity from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification. But 2025 so far has been a year of mild expectations.
In February, Cowen analysts issued a similar note warning that Microsoft was pulling back on some of its data center leases. And in January, of course, many of the AI and energy stocks that had been soaring 2024dropped when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released an open source model comparable in performance to the state of the art in the United States but that required far less computing power to train.
The Cowen analysts were hardly doomy about AI and data center construction, writing that Google and Meta may be “backfilling” the capacity left behind by Microsoft as they seek to expand their own data center footprints.
But the case for across the board optimism may be slightly dimming across the sector. CoreWeave, which buys Nvidia chips and operates data centers, has had to reduce the amount of money its seeking to raise in its planned initial public offering to $1.5 billion, from the over $4 billion it was looking to get from investors earlier in the IPO process, Bloomberg reported. Nvidia, an investor in CoreWeave and its most important supplier, will be “anchoring” the IPO, kicking in $250 million.
The tax agency reopened its online portal to allow dealerships to register sales retroactively.
As recently as last month, some electric vehicle buyers were running into roadblocks when they tried to claim the EV tax credit on their 2024 returns. Their claims were rejected, it turned out, because the dealership where they bought their EV never registered the sale with the Internal Revenue Service.
On Wednesday, the IRS instituted a fix: It reopened the online portal for dealerships to report these sales retroactively.
The confusion all started with a major change the IRS made to the EV tax credit program last year. Previously, all dealers had to do was give the buyer a “time of sale” report that they could submit to the IRS come tax season. But as of 2024, dealerships were expected to register every EV sale that was eligible for the tax credit through this new online portal. Not only that, they had to do so within three days of the sale. The portal would not allow entries dated more than three days post-sale.
The IRS and the National Automobile Dealers Association did outreach to educate dealerships about the changes, but many were apparently still unaware of the requirements — some never even made an online account. Customers were similarly ignorant of the intricacies of the process. Many received time of sale reports and thought they were all set. But in January, when they began trying to claim the credit on their taxes for the previous year, they were surprised to receive an error message saying that their EV was not registered with the IRS. Some tried to get their dealerships to register the sale retroactively, but the IRS portal didn’t allow for it.
President Trump has vowed to kill the EV tax credit, and Congress is just now beginning to hammer out the legislation that could execute his wishes. In light of that, and given the relative chaos at the IRS caused by Elon Musk’s “efficiency” department demanding access to private taxpayer information and laying off thousands of IRS employees, it was unclear whether the Treasury Department would do anything to help these unlucky EV buyers seeking their refunds. The Treasury did not respond to multiple inquiries from Heatmap in February.
The Dealers Association also never responded to multiple inquiries from Heatmap about the issue. But in a notice to dealerships this week, first reported by NPR, the trade group said the IRS planned to roll out an update to the portal on Wednesday to allow for sales made in 2024 to be submitted.
If any of this has made you nervous about getting an EV this year, remember that you have another, safer option for claiming the tax credit. Instead of claiming it on your taxes in 2026, you can transfer it to your dealer, who can take it off the sale price of the car on the spot. Just make sure they know about the online portal!
States filed yet another motion on Monday asking the court to release urgently needed disaster relief.
In case you missed it: The Federal Emergency Management Agency has continued to withhold millions of dollars from states for disaster recovery, relief, and preparedness despite a district court’s order from March 6 calling on the administration to release the funds.
Among the more than 200 FEMA grants to states that remain frozen are a case management program for survivors of the 2023 Maui wildfires, emergency readiness projects in Oregon, and flood hazard mitigation in Colorado, according to a motion filed on Monday in the lawsuit State of New York v. Trump.
The motion was filed the day after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said her department would move to “eliminate” FEMA during a cabinet meeting.
Twenty-two states plus the District of Columbia filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island in late January, after President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a directive to federal agency heads to conduct a review of funding related to “foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” and to pause disbursement of any related funds in the meantime. The states argued that the memo and the executive orders it cites were unconstitutional.
The states sought an injunction on the pause, which Chief Judge John McConnell Jr., a Biden appointee, granted in early March. “The Executive’s categorical freeze of appropriated and obligated funds fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government,” he wrote in the ruling. “Here, the Executive put itself above Congress. It imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending.”
The Trump administration filed notice with the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston that it is appealing the injunction a few days after it was issued.
Prior to the injunction order, the states had identified the disruptions from the pause on FEMA funds as being “particularly acute and widespread.” So as part of the injunction, the Judge directed FEMA to file a status report by March 14 detailing its compliance. But rather than detailing the release of grants previously held hostage, the status report federal lawyers filed on March 14 argued that the agency had “inherent authority” to conduct a “manual review” of the grants, and therefore it is not violating the court’s injunction by continuing to review — and therefore withhold — previously obligated funds.
“This manual review process is not a ‘pause’ or ‘freeze’ on funding,” the status report says, “nor does it mean that the grant is being frozen, held, or not being distributed.”
On Monday, states filed a motion calling BS on this argument and requesting that the court use its authority to enforce the injunction. This was urgent, they argued, because as the end of the first quarter nears, the lack of access to funding is going to start disrupting crucial programs.
If Hawaii doesn’t start receiving reimbursements for its federally-funded case management program by March 31, for example, it will be forced to immediately discontinue its work helping more than 4,000 wildfire survivors create tailored disaster recovery plans and navigate recovery resources. The state used to have to wait approximately a week for FEMA to review reimbursement requests and transfer the funds. Now it’s been waiting nearly 30 days. “This abrupt change in practice is near fatal because a key requirement of FEMA regarding these grant funds is that Hawaiʻi is precluded from maintaining more than three business days’ worth of cash on hand,” the states’ filing says.
FEMA is still issuing funds for some activities. The agency approved Fire Management Assistance Grants for North and South Carolina this week, where several major wildfires have been burning for weeks.
While the Trump administration fights the injunction in court, its supporters in Congress are fighting it on the floor. House Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced articles of impeachment against Judge McConnell on Tuesday, the latest in a series of such moves to impeach federal judges that have ruled against Trump’s actions. This is despite a warning from the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, John Roberts, last week in a rare public statement, that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”