The Electric: Batteries for AI Data Centers Have Dropped 45% In Price This Year

Last month, a senior Chinese government official told a gathering of a dozen of the country’s battery titans to scale back their “irrational” price war. One of the reasons: Their cutthroat competition had driven a startling 45% drop this year in the price of stationary storage batteries, used to back up electricity grids and AI data centers. The plunge in prices threatened the profitability of everyone in the battery industry, said the official, Li Licheng, China’s minister of industry and information technology.