ZincFive称今年AI数据中心镍锌电池销售将达1.05亿美元，并拟12月通过SPAC上市

Oregon startup ZincFive says it’s on track to generate $105 million in sales of nickel-zinc batteries to AI data centers this year, up 60% from 2025, and it plans to go public in a reverse merger by December. The company earned a 9.5% gross margin in the first half of the year, a substantial swing from negative 14% in the same period in 2025.

ZincFive’s much-improved financial picture this year, and the return of nickel-zinc batteries, are products of the dramatic upturn in the previously struggling next-generation battery industry, a result of the AI and drone booms.

Almost all the batteries used in major tech products like EVs, electronic devices and drones have cathodes made of nickel mixed with cobalt and often manganese, or of iron mixed with phosphate. Almost all have graphite anodes, sometimes mixed with silicon.

Zinc features in none of these popular batteries.

But ZincFive CEO Tod Higinbotham said a zinc anode along with a pure nickel cathode make for a battery able to completely discharge the energy held within it in 4 minutes, up to five times faster than conventional batteries can.

Such a battery would be too large and expensive to use in an EV and wouldn’t last very long, which is why no one deploys them in any commercial cars. But they are highly useful in AI data centers, where they provide an instant jolt of uninterrupted power when the electricity suddenly goes down, as it’s increasingly prone to do.

In a typical blackout, nickel-zinc batteries will deliver power in milliseconds so a data center’s graphics processing units do not lose an iota of data, and the batteries continue to deliver this power for up to 5 minutes. At that stage, the data center’s diesel or natural gas generators take over. That ability is crucial in a data center, where even an instant of lost power can be extremely expensive, given the cost of compute.

“It’s Edison technology with some new twists on the chemistry, and it allows it to cycle at very high rates,” Higinbotham told me.

Higinbotham said the company has shipped 1.3 gigawatts of these nickel-zinc batteries to customers, enough to temporarily power some of the world’s largest data centers. They look a lot like the standard lead-acid batteries found in combustion autos. ZincFive stacks up to 39 of them in a 7-foot-tall cabinet, placed on sliding trays within it. The company then positions multiple battery cabinets side by side in a data center.

Higinbotham said ZincFive was developing a battery that will operate even faster, discharging all its energy in only 2 minutes and then recharging just as quickly. Data centers frequently require such fast power because GPUs often demand power in large pulses lasting just 50 milliseconds. Such pulses can be 70% greater than a server’s normal power demand.

A data center will require such pulses millions of times over a period of months, Higinbotham said. “That’s been the big new challenge for AI and GPUs,” he said.

To obtain this power, data centers typically rely on supercapacitors, devices that deliver a small amount of power extremely fast. ZincFive is seeking to deploy a nickel-zinc battery that will deliver twice the number of bursts of power as a supercapacitor at roughly half the cost, he said.

He expects the battery to be ready for commercial sale by 2028.

In June, ZincFive filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public in a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. Higinbotham said he expected the merger process to finish by the middle of December.