A nickel-zinc battery inside an AI data center.
In the early days of commercial battery development, at the dawn of the 20th century, Thomas Edison believed the ideal use for batteries was to power long-range electric vehicles, and he even filed patents for nickel-iron and nickel-zinc vehicle batteries. But that bet failed completely: gasoline-powered internal combustion engines quickly overwhelmed Edison's battery inventions, and such batteries found only limited use in mining and railways.
Yet Edison's nickel-zinc battery is now making a comeback. The new generation of products has resolved the various flaws of the original, and thanks to its ultra-fast pulse discharge capability, it is beginning to power AI data centers.
Oregon-based startup ZincFive says sales of its nickel-zinc batteries for AI data centers are expected to reach $105 million this year, up 60% from 2025; the company plans to complete a listing in December through a reverse merger. In the first half of this year, the company's gross margin reached 9.5%, a dramatic improvement from the -14% gross margin in the same period of 2025.
ZincFive's sharply improved financial condition this year and the renewed attention on nickel-zinc batteries stem from an overall recovery in the next-generation battery industry, driven by the booming AI and drone sectors. For batteries used in mainstream tech products such as electric vehicles, consumer electronics and drones, the cathode is almost always nickel paired with cobalt or manganese, or iron paired with phosphate; the anode is mostly graphite, sometimes mixed with silicon. None of these mainstream battery systems use zinc.
But ZincFive CEO Todd Shiggenbotham says a battery with a zinc anode paired with a pure nickel cathode can release its entire stored charge within 4 minutes, discharging up to five times faster than conventional batteries. Such batteries are bulky, costly and have less-than-ideal cycle life, so they will not be used in mass-produced passenger vehicles. But they are extremely valuable in AI data centers: with grid outages becoming increasingly frequent, these batteries can deliver uninterrupted power the instant an outage occurs. During an ordinary blackout, nickel-zinc batteries can deliver power within milliseconds, ensuring that a data center's graphics processors do not lose a single bit of data, and can continue supplying power for up to 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, the data center's diesel or natural gas generators take over.
For data centers, this capability is crucial — computing power is extremely expensive, and even a momentary power loss can cause massive losses. Shiggenbotham told me: "This is essentially based on Edison's technology, just with a completely revamped chemistry, and the battery can withstand extremely high-frequency charge and discharge cycles."
Shiggenbotham says the company has already delivered nickel-zinc batteries with a total capacity of 1.3 gigawatts to customers, enough to provide short-term emergency power to some of the world's hyperscale data centers. The batteries look very similar to the lead-acid batteries used in gasoline-powered cars. ZincFive stacks up to 39 batteries on sliding trays in 7-foot-tall cabinets, then deploys multiple battery cabinets side by side inside data centers.
Shiggenbotham revealed that ZincFive is developing more powerful batteries: the full charge can be released in just 2 minutes, with charging speed matching that. AI data centers have a hard requirement for this kind of ultra-fast power delivery, as GPUs frequently generate high-power pulses lasting only 50 milliseconds, with instantaneous power consumption up to 70% higher than the server's normal power draw. Shiggenbotham says that over operating cycles lasting months, data centers will experience millions of such power pulses. "This is a major new problem brought about by AI and GPUs."
To handle these instantaneous high-power demands, data centers currently generally use supercapacitors, which can deliver small amounts of power extremely quickly. ZincFive plans to launch a new generation of nickel-zinc batteries: with twice the pulse discharge count of supercapacitors, at roughly half the cost. The new battery is expected to be commercially available in 2028.
In June of this year, ZincFive filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, planning to go public through a merger with a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company). Shiggenbotham expects the merger process to be completed in mid-December.
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