At Peak Energy, the Focus is on Avoiding the Missteps of a Big Battery Industry Failure

General Motors–backed startup Peak Energy boasts that it’s on a pathway to undercut China’s dominance of the massive batteries that power AI data centers and the grid. Its approach involves deploying an entirely different chemistry from the lithium-based ones China controls.

But success, Peak executives say, requires always keeping a dreaded word in mind: Northvolt.

In one of modern history’s worst business failures, Swedish battery maker Northvolt went bankrupt last year after squandering some $13 billion in equity and debt its founders had raised with the goal of building a European battery behemoth.

The collapse made Northvolt a cautionary tale in the battery industry. The company seemed to have the wind at its back: It had $55 billion in orders and the support of Volkswagen and BMW, in addition to the EU. Yet it never managed to reach commercial production.

Northvolt’s failure is a particularly top-of-mind lesson for Peak Energy co-founder and CEO Landon Mossburg, former president of Northvolt’s North America arm and a former Tesla executive. Mossburg co-founded Peak in 2023 to build sodium-ion stationary storage batteries that would leapfrog the lithium-based ones currently dominating backup power for AI data centers, the grid and other industrial deployments.

Last week, Peak announced that it had raised a $108 million Series B round, led by GM, to fund the build-out of the first stage of a 4-gigawatt-hour sodium-ion battery assembly plant in Sacramento, Calif., enough to power roughly 2.8 million homes for an hour. That plant plans to fulfill $1.1 billion in orders starting in the first quarter of next year.

Eventually, Mossburg wants Peak, in a partnership with GM, to make multiple components of the battery, including the cathodes and cells as well as the raw powders that go into making them. Tesla has successfully begun manufacturing cathodes, along with battery cells, showing that it’s possible to carry out what Peak has in mind. But in a conversation this week, Mossburg seemed a lot less focused on that and far more mindful of Northvolt’s fatal missteps. Chief among those, in his view, was its attempt to do too much at once, which resulted in mastering little.

“The contrast is very stark for me,” Mossburg told me, “because I went from Tesla to Northvolt. And one clearly worked, and the other one clearly didn’t.”

Peak is hardly alone in its fixation. Since its collapse, Northvolt has become an industry byword for everything that could possibly go wrong in producing batteries.

In 2017, two former Tesla executives, Peter Carlsson and Paolo Cerruti, launched Northvolt. They rapidly raised $13 billion for what they sold as a European battery champion that would compete on equal ground with industry giants, including Chinese behemoth Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd.

Carlsson and Cerruti began splashing around the cash, launching divisions to refine lithium, make cathodes, build complete cells and recycle them—all functions usually carried out by stand-alone companies. They also set out to build plants not only at home in Sweden but also in Germany, Poland, Norway and Canada. They acquired Cuberg, a California startup that was developing next-generation aviation batteries.

By 2024, however, Northvolt was still unable to reliably make battery cells at its flagship Swedish plant, as I reported at the time. Northvolt’s “first cathode plant didn’t work pretty much at all,” Mossburg said.

In summer 2025, Lyten—a relatively tiny San Jose, Calif., startup—scooped up most of Northvolt’s assets for pennies on the dollar.

Mossburg said he is intent on avoiding these blunders. His business thesis is that sodium—1,000 times more prevalent in the Earth’s crust than lithium—will be cheaper than lithium once manufacturers scale up processing it. And if that processing occurs outside China, sodium would also reduce lithium’s geopolitical risks for the U.S.

That’s if everything goes well. To avoid what happened to Northvolt, he said, Peak will do things one at a time. First, it will assemble batteries in Sacramento. Later, it will manufacture the sodium-ion cells it is currently developing alongside GM, which has backed Peak in two consecutive funding rounds. Mossburg also intends to make cathodes.

“We have told everybody who’s asked us to help catalyze the sodium-ion supply chain, which we’re very interested in doing, [that the] way to do it is sequentially and do it very, very fast sequentially. Don’t do it in parallel,” Mossburg said.

Where things can go wrong for battery makers like Peak is when they try to do everything at the same time, he said. Invariably, hiccups arise in the development or supply of one component or more. “You have a whole supply chain that needs to run together, and it’s the first time all of these factories are going to come online,” he said. “They all have to come online at the exact same time, just like a concert. If anything’s delayed, the whole thing is delayed. And you’re going to have some stuff delayed, especially as you get into active material production.

“Building three businesses at once like Northvolt did is pretty tough,” Mossburg said. “And you don’t have to, because you can do it just as fast. You just do it sequentially.”

Steve LeVine is editor of The Electric. Previously, he worked at Axios, Quartz and Medium, and before that The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He is the author of The Powerhouse: America, China and the Great Battery War, and is on Twitter @stevelevine