General Motors is expanding its grid-scale storage capabilities by betting on sodium-ion, which remains a relatively niche battery chemistry. Earlier this week, the Fortune 500 company announced a partnership with Peak Energy, the leader of a handful of companies looking to commercialize sodium-ion in the U.S.
The partnership comes with a strategic investment into Peak Energy by the automaker’s venture arm GM Ventures, and it will see the two companies collaborate closely to develop and deploy new sodium-ion battery cells. GM will retain exclusive manufacturing rights, while Peak will incorporate the cell into its energy storage systems.
Cameron Dales, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, told Latitude Media that the announcement is significant both for the company and for sodium-ion broadly. The backing, he said, could help Peak graduate from “a promising but earlier-stage technology company” to a “highly credible” one. And it’s a signal that the idea of using sodium-ion for grid storage is moving into the mainstream, he added, after being tested in small pilots over the past couple of years.
“It’s important for our end customers to see a company with the financial and manufacturing resources and the history of GM [back sodium-ion],” Dales said. “They view it as a validating announcement that this is real, it’s reaching scale.”
Sodium-ion batteries, which rely on abundant materials like salt, have long been a proven technology, but have never had widespread uptake in the Western world because of their low energy density. While that might have been a problem for smaller batteries, it’s less relevant for the longer-duration storage applications that are gaining traction now, thanks especially to data centers’ need for them, as well as their willingness to pay.
And as Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery and sustainability, explained in an article about the partnership, sodium-ion cells are more durable and adaptable to different temperatures compared to chemistries like lithium-ion.
“That means that sodium ion-powered energy storage systems have the potential to operate without active cooling and with much less system complexity,” he wrote. “In large energy storage systems, that matters. Active cooling requires more hardware, more maintenance, more parasitic energy losses, more noise, and more opportunities for failure — all of which can drive costs higher over time.”
These are among the reasons why Peak Energy, which started in 2023 as a technology-agnostic energy storage company, landed on sodium-ion as its chosen chemistry for grid storage.
“We started with the market, not with the technology,” Dales said. “We chose sodium-ion… because of its properties, which we feel are superior for this application.”
The company raised a $55 million Series A led by Xora Innovation in August 2024, and has started deploying its batteries into the field this year. Recent customer announcements include a $500 million agreement with Jupiter Power for 4.75 gigawatt-hours in November 2025, and a February 2026 agreement with Energy Vault for 1.5 GWh for data centers.
But the product is still at the first-generation stage, Dale acknowledged, and its capabilities can be improved greatly.
“We’re at the very early days — kind of where LFP was 10 years ago, on the steep improvement curve,” he said. “But as a small company, we don’t necessarily have the resources or the scale to fully realize all of the potential and the projects that are on our roadmap by ourselves.”
That’s where GM, with its experienced and well-funded research and development team, comes in. “The collaboration on the R&D side is designed to take the head start that Peak already has in the technology development, and… develop it together with both companies contributing people and resources,” Dale added.
For GM, the investment is part of a push to build on the company’s “expertise in leading cell chemistries and formats” and chase new business opportunities, as CEO Mary Barra told investors during an earnings call last summer. Just a few days later, GM announced an agreement with Redwood Materials to develop grid-scale energy storage using new and repurposed batteries originally developed for its electric vehicles.
It was one of a series of high-profile expansions by automakers and EV battery manufacturers — including Ford, LG Energy, and SK On — into energy storage, as weak EV sales pushed some of them to redirect battery capacity and supply chains toward more promising markets. GM is also in a joint venture with LG Energy Solution to make LFP batteries for LG’s commercial energy storage business, with first production expected this month. That’s a way for GM to support near-term grid demand, Kelty said, “while we invest in the next generation of storage.”
With Peak Energy, the company plans to start prototyping sodium-ion cells purpose-built for stationary storage at its Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center by the end of the year, and aims to commercialize them by 2028.
