The Information 复盘：Enovix 放弃旗舰钢笼路线拿下 10 万颗军用无人机电池订单，SES AI 韩国无人机电池厂扩产至 300 万颗/年

Those orders have yet to materialize. Enovix now estimates revenue this year will be around $41 million. But last week, the company announced an order from a customer it had not been pursuing—a maker of combat drones that signed a contract for 100,000 Enovix batteries, to be delivered by the middle of next year.

Enovix Executive Chair T.J. Rodgers said he couldn’t name the customer. But he said the single order, coming seemingly out of nowhere, exceeded all of Enovix’s second-quarter revenue of $9 million. Rodgers said it’s the first tranche in a string of such orders he expects from the same customer, the next of which will begin in the second half of next year.

“The drone business is going apeshit,” said Rodgers, the billionaire founder of Cypress Semiconductor in the 1980s. “The drone business is totally unexpected, absolutely, totally unexpected.”

The other surprise, at least for investors, is that the order was not for Enovix’s flagship stainless steel battery, which it has spent a decade developing to contain the swelling of its silicon anode, but for batteries with a conventional architecture involving no cage at all. Those conventional batteries also feature a silicon anode but use other methods such as carbon to contain the swelling.

The order in part reflects how the drone boom, triggered by the wars in Ukraine and Iran, has spilled into the struggling battery industry, providing startups like Enovix with new life. But it also shows how those sales have gone primarily to companies prepared to set aside long-pursued exotic batteries and supply more conventional, less risky ones.

On Monday, SES AI announced that[it will triple](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261019058459/en/SES-AI-Completes-Ramp-of-Korea-Drone-Battery-Plant-to-One-Million-NDAA-Compliant-Cells-Per-Year-and-Plans-to-Further-Expand-to-Three-Million-NDAA-Compliant-Cells-Per-Year-by-Second-Quarter-2027) production capacity of drone batteries at a South Korean factory by the second quarter next year to 3 million batteries a year. SES spent more than a decade developing next-generation lithium-metal anode batteries for electric vehicles but won no EV customers. So in South Korea, it is making silicon-anode drone batteries, though it says it’s also manufacturing lithium-metal ones at a smaller scale. SES did not respond to messages.

The same dynamic appears to have emerged in another technology undergoing a boom—robots. Last week,[Agility Robotics said](https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/the-electric/second-robotics-contract-nyobolt-will-power-agilitys-latest-humanoid?rc=fd9gxc) it would power the next generation of its humanoid robot, Digit, with batteries made by U.K.-based Nyobolt. Those batteries will not be the ones Nyobolt is known for—involving an exotic anode[made of niobium](https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/the-electric/nyobolt-paired-battery-non-humanoid-robots-won-1-billion-valuation?rc=fd9gxc)—but more-conventional ones using graphite anodes.

The makers of drones, humanoid robots and other battery-powered technologies have not entirely rejected next-generation batteries—all of these deals involve batteries that are unconventional in one way or another. But, at least for now, they have not embraced the most exotic approaches.

One big reason is cost—exotic batteries may promise more energy, faster charging and greater acceleration, but none of them is manufactured at large scale, so no one has gone through the process of wringing out their costs. As a result, they are expensive. More-conventional batteries, even if they deliver less performance, simply cost less.

Another reason is risk: Batteries such as Enovix’s stainless steel cage design are not yet in commercial use, so no one knows how they will behave in actual deployment.

Wall Street has soured on Enovix, and the drone order has not changed that basic sentiment. Investors pushed up the company’s shares 10% in the two days after its Oct. 13 announcement of the deal, but the stock then plunged before rebounding again on Wednesday. It is down 68% over the last year.

Rodgers argues, however, that the order is a sign that Enovix is finally turning around. “Enovix has been a promise ready to happen now for about a decade,” he told me. “And we finally got our shit together, and we can make the batteries we talk about.”

Rodgers said that in addition to receiving the drone order, Enovix had shipped 50,000 cells to a smartphone maker that was prototyping a new model.

He estimated that 2027 revenue will be around $100 million, or more than double this year’s number. Most of that, he said, will be from smartphone customers. But he said combat drones were an especially good find for Enovix because defense industry customers were prepared to pay a premium.

“Military business is perfect for a young company that’s immature in manufacturing and therefore has high costs, and hasn’t ramped the volume and amortized overhead—all the standard stuff,” he said.

“Once you get into a drone and you’re military certified,” he added, “they need all kinds of batteries.”