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The UAW makes its first move.
In Shawn Fain’s victory speech after the United Autoworkers won significant raises and benefits from the Big Three automakers earlier this fall, the union president promised to go on to accomplish what no other UAW president had managed to do. “We’re going to organize non-union auto companies like we’ve never organized before,” he said.
On Thursday, the union made its first move: Workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee went public with a union drive, announcing that more than 30% of the plant had signed union authorization cards.
After the UAW won 25% raises in its deals with GM, Ford, and Stellantis, Volkswagen gave its workers an 11% raise. In a press release, workers at the Chattanooga plant said they were striking due to pay that lagged behind their unionized peers, mistreatment by management, forced overtime, and a lack of time off. “Turnover at the plant is a serious problem,” said Josh Epperson, an equipment operator in assembly. “I have trained new people on the line and most of them are gone in a few months. They don’t have the tools and the support they need to thrive.”
The Chattanooga plant opened 15 years ago and is VW’s only factory in the U.S.; by contrast, all of the company’s workers in Germany are unionized. The U.S. plant currently produces the VW Atlas, Atlas Sport, and the company’s only electric model currently available here, the ID.4.
Workers at the U.S. plant have already attempted to unionize twice, in 2014 and 2019, both of which were narrow losses. An account of what went wrong in 2019 by Chris Brooks, a labor activist and current strategist for Shawn Fain, said that lawmakers threatened to pull incentives for the plant’s expansion and new electric vehicle line if the plant flipped.
Similar expansions are on the table again this time around. In early November, senior vice president and head of strategy at VW Group of America Reinhard Fischer announced plans to bring a new, under-$35,000 EV to the U.S. market. He said the company would either build the vehicle at the Chattanooga Plant or in Puebla, Mexico. He also said that the company was considering assembling battery packs for the vehicle in the U.S. due to subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act.
While 30% support is low, it clears the threshold to submit a petition to the National Labor Relations Board to hold a vote on the union’s formation. Still, the Chattanooga workers are likely to hold off for more. The UAW has said that once 50% of workers at a nonunion plant sign cards, Fain will hold a rally at the plant. If the drive gets 70% support, UAW will seek recognition from the company, or otherwise submit a petition to the NLRB.
There are 13 non-union automakers operating in the U.S. Tesla, which has six factories here, could be next — Fain told Reuters that many workers at the EV giant have also expressed interest in organizing.
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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!
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.