WOBURN, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SES AI Corporation (NYSE: SES), a global leader in the development and manufacturing of high-performance Li-Metal batteries, today announced two major milestones in its AI Initiative: the promotion of Dr. Kang Xu, current Chief Scientist, to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead the company’s AI efforts, effective October 17th, 2024; and the signing of its first commercial agreement with a leading global electrolyte producer. This new partnership will harness AI to accelerate Li-Metal and Li-ion electrolyte development across four key applications: EV, heavy-duty trucking, consumer electronics, and grid storage.
“This is one of the world’s first applications of AI in electric transportation, starting from the molecular level,” said SES AI CEO Qichao Hu. “Our work has already produced exciting results, including the recommendation of novel molecules that have resulted in high coulombic efficiency and long cycle life electrolytes—key breakthroughs for SES AI’s Li-Metal batteries in EV and Urban Air Mobility applications.”
The signing of its first commercial agreement for AI and the promotion of Dr. Xu as CTO are important steps toward SES AI’s vision to becoming a global battery material discovery leader with end-to-end capabilities including molecular property mapping, AI model development, human domain expertise, molecule synthesis, electrolyte formulation and production, cell production and validation (from lab samples to A-samples and B-samples and beyond). The global battery electrolyte market (Li-Metal and Li-ion) is currently around $12bn and expected to grow to $25bn by 2030 according to Grand View Research. This application of AI is expected to revolutionize this market and enable new applications.
This partnership is a first in the battery industry and will accelerate future electric mobility with the commercialization of Li-Metal for EV and UAM. To date, humans have only studied fewer than 1,000 unique molecules for electrolytes, out of a total of 10^12 possible molecules.
Dr. Kang Xu, a seasoned expert in battery electrolyte development with nearly 30 years of experience, joined SES AI as Chief Scientist in August 2023. Before joining SES AI, Dr. Xu worked at the Army Research Lab, where he also served as a distinguished Army Research Lab Fellow. Dr. Xu now leads SES AI’s AI initiatives, managing a team of world-class computational chemists, AI/ML scientists, data scientists, and battery scientists to create tangible results applying its proprietary AI machine to real life and commercial problem solving.
“Over the past 30 years, the Li-ion battery has changed the world, from Sony’s Walkman to smartphones and laptops, and now our electric mobility transition. The electrolyte plays a key role—much of the discoveries made in electrolyte development were often by accident, and the field of battery electrolyte remains a ‘black box’,” said SES AI CTO Dr. Kang Xu. “Our AI integrates cutting-edge computing hardware with the latest advancements in computational chemistry to exhaustively map a vast database of molecular structures and properties. Combined with the knowledge and expertise of our team of world-class human scientists, this data can be used to train AI models to generate new molecules which are synthesized at our Electrolyte Foundry, formulated into electrolytes, and then tested in actual cells ranging from small lab size to A-sample and to B-sample Li-Metal cells.”
Earlier this year, SES AI announced a collaboration with NVIDIA, Crusoe and Supermicro to leverage state of the art computing software and hardware (NVIDIA H100 GPU) to accelerate material discovery for electric transportation by mapping the physical and chemical properties of the vast universe of small molecules.
For more information about SES AI and its initiatives, please visit the SES AI website.
About SES AI:
SES AI Corp. (NYSE: SES) is powering the future of global electric transportation on land and in the air with the world’s most advanced Li-Metal batteries. SES AI is the first battery company in the world to accelerate its pace of innovation by utilizing superintelligent AI across the spectrum of its business, from research and development; materials sourcing; cell design; engineering and manufacturing; to battery health and safety monitoring. Founded in 2012, SES AI is an Li-Metal battery developer and manufacturer headquartered in Boston and with operations in Singapore, Shanghai, and Seoul. Learn more at SES.AI.
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