It’s been a historic year for electrification in the auto industry, but nestled within most stories or conversations about the rapid advance of EVs is a caveat: We’re going to need a lot more batteries.

While accelerating installations of renewables are also driving the battery boom, the auto industry was the key force in 2022, as demand for EVs began to outstrip supply and governments further formalized both sticks (state bans on gas-powered vehicles) and carrots (subsidies) for EVs.

• In the US, EVs are projected to account for 52% of new car sales by 2030, per BNEF, a staggering increase from just 8% today.

North America’s capacity for battery cell production could grow more than tenfold, from less than 60 GWh in 2021 to more than 700 GWh by 2030, per Wood Mackenzie estimates.

Big picture: For automakers, obtaining more batteries is now a task as important as building a motor—it’s fundamental to manufacturing cars.

Let’s take a look back at how the US battery industry evolved in 2022 to try and keep pace with this rapid change. Read the full story here.—GD

We may be midway through December, but there’s little evidence of holiday cheer in the latest update on venture-capital funding.

What’s new? In November, the contraction in startup funding accelerated further, with VCs investing $22 billion worldwide, per Crunchbase—less than one-third of the $70 billion invested in November 2021. That’s down 19% from the month prior, when VCs doled out $27 billion, and the lowest monthly total since February 2020.

• The same trends appeared in November as in previous months: The pullback in funding was more pronounced for later-stage companies than it was for earlier-stage startups.
• Deal count was also down significantly last month, with fewer than 2,000 startups raising a round, compared to 3,500 a year earlier.

Big picture: This year has not merely been rough for startup funding—it’s been historically rough. Through the first 11 months of the year, global deal value was down 42% year over year, per Preqin data cited by Bloomberg, a steeper contraction than those that followed the dot-com bubble and the Great Recession.

Read the story on-site.—DM

For about two decades, Google has been the digital destination most internet users go to when they have a question.

But now, the internet’s favorite new chatbot has some onlookers questioning whether we’re about to see the baton pass from Google’s iconic, primary-color-splashed landing page to the dialogue box of ChatGPT, which has already surpassed 1 million users since OpenAI released it on November 30.

Last week…We asked all of you to weigh in on the question, and ~1,400 responses later, the results are in:

• Most respondents (61%) said Google is safe from ChatGPT, while just 20% said it will disrupt the search giant.
• The remaining 19% said they weren’t sure.

Big picture: The main argument that ChatGPT will overtake Google goes like this: The tool is more useful than Google because it provides direct answers rather than pages of results.

• And, as ChatGPT itself put it when I asked it to make the case for its superiority over Google, “this makes it a much more efficient and user-friendly option for accessing information.”

But this argument ignores a lot of realities: That ChatGPT is often inaccurate, that ChatGPT is currently losing money on each query while Google made about $40 billion on search ads alone last quarter, and that, uh, Google is an AI pioneer that has itself built a large language model so advanced that one of its engineers swore the chatbot was sentient. Also, as ChatGPT itself will remind you, the model can’t search the web.

There’s no doubt that ChatGPT is impressive and possibly more useful than traditional search for specific queries. But it feels way too early to determine whether it will be capable of disrupting Google’s search dominance.—DM

This week’s poll: Looking ahead to next year, do you think VC funding will contract further, grow, or stay flat?

Grow
Shrink
⎼ Flat

Stat: Google is trying to work with the DoD to digitize a repository of 31 million tissue samples from US troops, part of the largest repository of its kind in the world.

Quote: “This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy.”—Arati Prabhakar, the White House science advisor, at a news conference about the National Ignition Facility’s nuclear fusion breakthrough

Read: Satellite images show progress building Saudi Arabia’s futuristic city, The Line.

Tis’ the season: Protecting against cyber threats weighs even more heavily on the shoulders of IT managers this time of year. Check out IT Brew’s guide to keep your company & employee data safe.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Meet the organization helping aviation companies harness digital twins
• Why Hyundai—and other automakers—want to sell you solar panels
• How the tech downturn could usher in an era of ‘healthier’ innovation