The automotive industry's EV transition produced excess battery manufacturing capacity and a supply chain built around high-precision thermal management. The AI infrastructure buildout needs battery storage, backup power, and thermal systems at a scale it cannot source fast enough from conventional suppliers. Both industries are now finding each other.
BorgWarner, the automotive supplier best known for turbochargers and drivetrain components, is supplying turbine-generator systems for data center power infrastructure. The application draws on the same rotating machinery expertise BorgWarner developed for vehicle powertrains. Ford is investing $2 billion to convert its EV battery plant in Glendale, Kentucky into a grid energy storage facility targeting 20 gigawatt-hours of annual production capacity by late 2027. Ford has already signed its first customer: EDF, the renewable power developer. General Motors is retooling its Tennessee battery plant, co-owned with LG Energy Solution, and partnering with Redwood Materials on battery cells for stationary storage.
Eleven battery plants globally are being converted from EV production to stationary storage. Eight are in the United States. The manufacturing infrastructure, the thermal management systems for the battery packs, the quality control processes, and the skilled workforce are all transferable. The end product changes. The production capability does not.
For data center operators and developers, this matters because behind-the-meter battery storage is becoming a standard component of AI facility design. The Bessemer Venture Partners analysis published this week identified roughly 50 gigawatts of behind-the-meter gas generation announced in 2025 as data centers pursue power independence from a grid with five-to-seven year interconnection queues. Battery storage pairs with that on-site generation to provide the load-leveling and ride-through capacity that AI inference workloads require without the thermal startup delays of gas turbines.
Battery thermal management is a direct analog to data center thermal management. Lithium cells operate within narrow temperature bands. Too hot and they degrade. Too cold and their capacity drops. The battery management systems that automakers developed for EV packs, which monitor cell temperatures at millisecond intervals and route cooling fluid precisely, are the same class of system that stationary storage facilities require to maintain performance and cycle life. Ford's thermal engineering for the Glendale facility draws on the same team that designed cooling for the F-150 Lightning pack.
KPMG automotive leader Lenny LaRocca described the industry condition as: "Volatility is not just the storm — it's the climate." That framing applies equally to the data center supply chain. The companies that designed for EV demand and found themselves with excess capacity are now the fastest path to behind-the-meter storage at the scale the AI buildout requires. Ford's first customer being EDF, a renewable power developer, rather than a hyperscaler directly, suggests the initial market entry is through the power supply side of the data center infrastructure stack, not the compute side. That is the right starting point.