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Battery expert Jeff Dahn inside the frunk of a red Model S Battery expert Jeff Dahn inside the frunk of a red Model S

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Tesla donates $3.1M of $6M grant to Jeff Dahn’s Dalhousie University battery team

Battery expert Jeff Dahn inside the frunk of a red Model S [Source: dal.ca]

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A team of battery researchers at Canada’s Dalhousie University are the recipients of a $6 million grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). The NSERC will give the team, headed by Dr. Jeff Dahn, $2.9 million in funding. Tesla, who has worked very closely with Dahn’s team, will also contribute an additional $3.1 million to help develop advanced batteries from electric cars and grid energy storage.

Dahn and Tesla have worked together since 2016 when the two signed a five-year partnership to improve energy density and the life cycle of lithium-ion batteries. Tesla and Dahn signed another five-year contract earlier this year. Dahn has worked with batteries for around 40 years and has published over 700 papers related to battery technology.

Dahn has even been listed as an author on several Tesla battery patents, including one for an electrolyte solution that could be added to lithium-ion cells to extend longevity and increase performance.

Tesla renews contract with Jeff Dahn’s battery team at Dalhousie University

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Dalhousie University expanded its team in January upon the five-year extension with Tesla. The institution added Dr. Chongyin Yang as the Tesla Canada Chair and Dr. Michael Metzger as the Herzberg-Dahn Chair to supplement Dahn’s experience and ensure that Dalhousie remains a global force in battery tech advancements.

The $6 million in funding will be used for several new projects that include:

  • Lowering the costs of batteries for electric vehicles and electrical energy storage applications
  • Increasing the lifetime of batteries for electric vehicles and electrical energy storage applications
  • Increasing the energy density of batteries for electric vehicles and electrical energy storage applications
  • Maintaining and improving the safety of batteries for electric vehicles and electrical energy storage applications
  • Increasing the content of sustainable materials in the batteries

If Dahn’s team of researchers at Dalhousie University can achieve these goals, it would not only revolutionize EV and energy storage batteries but would also make renewable energy and Earth-friendly transportation more accessible and affordable.

Dahn spoke highly of the funding and was very appreciative of the grant that will catalyze the opportunity for more battery research. “I am very grateful for this funding from NSERC and Tesla,” Dahn said. “This will allow Chongyin, Michael, and me to solve many remaining puzzles that will help improve battery lifetime and lower cost.  The students trained in this program are finding, and will continue to find, immediate employment in the advanced battery sector locally and around the world.  Tesla is a wonderful partner and a world leader in electric vehicle, solar, and electrical energy storage products.  We share their commitment to help combat climate change through electrified transportation and renewable energy generation and storage.”

Tesla and Dahn are contractually tied until 2026.

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“With a distinguished career in innovative thinking, fundamental science, and strong industry partnerships, Dr. Jeff Dahn exemplifies research excellence,” Dr. Alice Aiken, Vice President of Research and Innovation at Dalhousie, said. “And we are incredibly fortunate to have two world-class scientists like Dr. Chongyin Yang and Dr. Michael Metzger join Dalhousie University and the exclusive partnership with Tesla.”

Tesla also showed its excitement for the Dalhousie team. “We are thrilled for our work with Dalhousie, Dr. Jeff Dahn, Dr. Chongyin Yang and Dr. Michael Metzger,” Tesla said in a statement. “We are excited and look forward to their important contributions in battery technology to help achieve our mission.”

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, or be sure to email me at joey@teslarati.com or on Twitter @KlenderJoey.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.

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SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.

The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.

Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors

Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.

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For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.

The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.

The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.

Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.

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Elon Musk

Tesla Supercharger for Business exposes jaw-dropping ROI gap between best and worst locations

Tesla’s new Supercharger for Business calculator reveals an eye-opening all-in cost and location-based ROI projections.

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tesla v4 supercharger

Tesla has launched an online calculator for its Supercharger for Business program, giving property owners their first transparent look at what it really costs to install Superchargers on site and what kind of return they can expect.

The program itself launched in September 2025, allowing businesses to purchase and operate Supercharger hardware on their own property while Tesla handles installation, maintenance, software, and 24/7 driver support. As Teslarati reported at launch, hosts also get their logo placed on the chargers and their location integrated into Tesla’s in-car navigation, meaning drivers are actively routed there. The stalls are open to all EVs, not just Teslas.


The new online calculator, announced by Tesla on Wednesday with the note that “simplicity and transparency” have been a problem in the industry, lets any business enter a U.S. address and get a real cost and revenue model. A standard 8-stall V4 Supercharger site runs approximately $500,000 in hardware and $55,000 per post for installation, bringing an all-in price just shy of $1 million. Tesla charges a flat $0.10 per kWh fee to cover software, billing, and network operations. Businesses set their own retail price and keep the margin above that fee.

Tesla expands its branded ‘For Business’ Superchargers

 

Taking a look at Tesla’s Supercharger for Business online calculator, we can see that ROI is not uniform, and the gap between a strong location and a poor one can stretch the breakeven point by several years.

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The biggest driver is foot traffic and how long people stay. A busy rest station, hotel, or outlet mall brings in repeat visitors who need to charge while they’re already stopped, pushing utilization numbers higher and shortening payback time.

Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator

Tesla Supercharger for Business ROI calculator

Local electricity rates matter just as much on the cost side. Markets like California carry some of the highest commercial electricity rates in the country, which eats into the margin between what a host pays per kWh and what they charge drivers. At the same time, dense urban areas with high EV adoption tend to support higher retail charging prices, which can offset that cost if demand is strong enough. Weather also plays a role. Cold climates reduce battery efficiency and increase charging frequency, but they can also suppress utilization in winter months if drivers avoid stopping in exposed outdoor locations. Suburban and rural sites face a different problem: lower baseline EV traffic, which means a site with cheaper power and lower operating costs can still take longer to pay back simply because the stalls sit idle more often. Tesla’s calculator uses real fleet data to pre-fill utilization estimates by ZIP code, so businesses can run their specific address against these variables rather than relying on averages.

The program has seen real adoption. Wawa, already the largest host of Tesla Superchargers with over 2,100 stalls across 223 locations, opened its first fully owned and branded site in Alachua, Florida earlier this year. Francis Energy of Oklahoma and the city of Alpharetta, Georgia have also deployed branded stations through the program, as Teslarati covered in January.

Tesla now exceeds 80,000 Supercharger stalls worldwide, and the calculator makes the economic case for accelerating that number through private investment rather than company-owned sites alone.

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Energy

Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

Tesla’s folding V4 Supercharger ships 33% more per truck, cuts deployment time and cost significantly.

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Tesla V4 Supercharger installation ramping in Europe

Tesla is rolling out a folding V4 Supercharger design, an engineering change that allows 33% more units to fit on a single delivery truck, cuts deployment time in half, and reduces overall installation cost by roughly 20%.

The folding mechanism addresses one of the least glamorous but most consequential bottlenecks in charging infrastructure: getting hardware from factory floor to job site efficiently. By collapsing the form factor for transit and unfolding into an operational configuration on arrival, the new design dramatically reduces the logistics overhead that has historically slowed Supercharger rollouts, particularly at large or remote sites where multiple units are needed simultaneously.

The timing aligns with a broader acceleration in Tesla’s network strategy. In March 2026, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet after more than seven years and 15,000 units, pivoting entirely to V4 cabinet production. The V4 cabinet itself is already a generational leap, delivering up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, while supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. The folding transport innovation layers logistical efficiency on top of that technical foundation.

Tesla launches first ‘true’ East Coast V4 Supercharger: here’s what that means

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Tesla Charging’s Director Max de Zegher, commenting on the V4 cabinet when it launched, captured the operational philosophy behind these changes: “Posts can peak up to 500kW for cars, but we need less than 1MW across 8 posts to deliver maximum power to cars 99% of the time.” The design philosophy has always been about maximizing real-world throughput, not just peak specs, and the folding transport upgrade extends that thinking into the supply chain itself.

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