Home / Transcripts / QuantumScape Corporation (QS) · August 12, 2026

QuantumScape Corporation (QS) Earnings Call Transcript

August 12, 2026

NASDAQ US Consumer Discretionary Automobile Components conference_presentation 35 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

William Peterson analyst
#1

Good morning, and welcome to JPMorgan's Auto Conference. My name is Bill Peterson, and I'll be hosting Kevin Hettrich from QuantumScape. He's the CFO. We don't have any slides today. [Operator Instructions] Kevin, thanks for joining the auto conference. Appreciate this. And maybe just as an introduction for those less familiar, can you provide a brief overview of QuantumScape, the core technology and what's your view as maybe some of the key misunderstood points about this?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#2

Terrific. Good morning to those in the room. Thank you, Bill, for hosting us here at the conference. QuantumScape is the leader in solid-state lithium metal battery development. Solid-state lithium metal is a type of chemistry beyond lithium ion that carries advantages in everything that customers would care about. It's called solid-state lithium metal because the solid-state part, a thin ceramic separator sits between the 2 active materials in the battery and lithium metal because when you charge the device, lithium is stored in a pure metal form as opposed to lithium-ion, which is a conventional batteries today. The ion part of lithium-ion speaks to a host material that's all around it. And because it's stored in a pure metal format, it's the elimination of that host material that leads to all the advantages of our battery chemistry, smaller and lighter, faster charging, better safety performance, lower cost at maturity and scale. So where we are as a company, we've been in a development and commercialization of this new chemistry. We announced our first product in 2024 at the Automotive A sample type product range, the QSE-5. That's an 800-watt-hour-per-liter cell with -- more than 800-watt-hour-per liter-cell with more than 300 watt hours per kilogram, charges in about 12 minutes from 10% to 80% of improved safety performance, which is better than anything on multiple dimensions you'd find in the market today. We've historically focused and continue to focus on electric vehicles. We've had a long-standing partnership with Volkswagen, where we have a collaboration and licensing agreement up to 85 gigawatt hours of scale in the licensing agreement. We're in the collaboration phase. We're getting paid to do development and sampling and demos on their behalf. We have a team from VW PowerCo working alongside of us on the pilot line that we just started up. We work with 4 of the top 10 OEMs in the world, VW is named. Honda, we just -- they named themselves in June. We can talk about that a little bit more. And with the start of our highly automated pilot line, the Eagle line in February, we have additional sampling capacity, and we announced 2 new customer verticals, one in data centers and one in advanced solutions. And it's from that vertical that we sampled to a U.S. defense prime that we talked about in the last earnings call. So that's -- the other thing I might highlight, a capital-light business model. So we get cash 2 ways. One is we get paid in the current moment from partners and ecosystem players who are paying for sampling demos, custom development. And we're setting the foundation for much larger economic opportunity, which would be licensing upon successful transfer of the technology to their factories. So cash in 2 forms, and we avoid gigawatt hour scale type CapEx. You asked about some things that are maybe underappreciated and not intuitive. So we've done $40 million in cumulative customer billings to date. That's worth highlighting. The -- we did $19.5 million last year. We're already above that. I think like around $21.8 million this year. The advantage we have in the chemistry is pretty fundamental. If you -- we're very proud of that technology platform, the patents and trade secrets on it. And that is strongly counter positioned like to try to replicate that, you'd have to start a new company even if you navigate all the patents and trade secrets and then the growing customer and partner ecosystem. That's kind of a nice teaser from there.

William Peterson analyst
#3

No, I appreciate that introduction. And for those who came in the room earlier, we can take questions using the microphone. But maybe you've been at the firm for more than a decade. So -- but maybe just looking at the last year, what has been some of the more important changes, whether it be organizationally, commercially or technically? And what does that enable as we look ahead to next year and the years beyond?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#4

Yes. Great question. So just a little less than a year ago, we, together with our partners, VW, PowerCo and Audi were one of the highlights in Munich Auto Show, where we powered a Ducati V21L race bikes across the stage. That was our first vehicle demo for the company. And then just a quarter or 2 later, started up a very highly automated pilot line in our Eagle line. That's important, arguably one of our most important focus areas as a company because all commercial roads go through that. Industrializing that for the next level of scale in terms of process and equipment supply -- equipment design and supply chain development is critical for all paths of commercialization. It provides higher sampling volumes for Volkswagen, for Honda for these 2 other top 10 global OEMs and for these new verticals. And then finally, for the tech transfer itself, when we have partners and customers on site, that's the line from which we can teach from and design the future.

William Peterson analyst
#5

Yes. I'm going to move to, I guess, manufacturing and maybe let's start off with the Eagle pilot line. Maybe you can kind of explain the significance of having the Eagle pilot line in the Bay Area and whilst demonstrating scalable production remains a critical goal this year. And I have some follow-ups as well.

Kevin Hettrich executive
#6

Yes. There's a saying that goes around Silicon Valley and our Chairman of our Board, Dennis Segers and CEO, Siva Sivaram talked about a lot. You don't really know what you have until you build 1 million of it. As you get higher volumes, you get statistical confidence intervals around failure modes, and it really hones in the -- Siva also will repeat systematic, methodical iterative. And we're in that mode of once you've established a baseline of volume, the way you come down a cost curve, the way you drive quality, the way you improve operational metrics is just to produce a lot of parts, identify kind of common causes you want to eliminate, you eliminate them, you root cause them, control them and you move on. And like that is the wheel of improvement. And that really requires and is best supported by automation because you're able to do that, things are done in a very repeatable way and you get nice part counts and you get kind of nice signal. So that was a big deal for all the reasons that I mentioned, it's important and is a really important stepping stone for the company. And we -- one of the thing I would highlight in the capital-light model is we're working with arguably the world's #1 and #2 suppliers of ceramics in that of Corning and Murata to have them produce at gigawatt hour scale, our separator to supply to different cell manufacturers like a VW PowerCo. We think that's the best of both worlds. We know our material system. We know the processes. We know the equipment design to this level of scale. Of course, your Corning and Muratas know how to -- have a lot of experience taking the technologies down that kind of cost curve as you reach new orders of magnitude. And that's kind of capital efficient [ rate ] kind of a bull's eye on our capital-light model.

William Peterson analyst
#7

So in addition to, I guess, the partners you have on the supply side, when we think about production, what are the key metrics that matter, uptime, yield, throughput? And I think you've talked about uptime of like greater 90%. What are the next, I guess, things under control that you're looking to improve?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#8

If I point investors to 3 separate things. One is there are internal metrics. All the ones you named are things that we track. We did talk about in the last earnings call as a measure of the Eagle line kind of becoming -- the process becoming more stable. We are achieving uptimes of more than 90%. We do plan on continuously improving everything in that systematic, methodical, iterative style that I mentioned. The second is output. As we make improvements in those metrics, output will rise. We said a goal on the last quarter was to double the Eagle line output from where it was in Q2 over the rest of the year, that's a sign of maturity of us making process -- of making progress on the process as well as that sampling volume can then go to your Volkswagens, Hondas, the other OEMs and these 2 other verticals. So that's important. And then the third thing we're just talking about some of the broader ecosystem, continue to make progress with Corning and Murata. And in a success case, you'll hear us making announcements in other parts of the supply chain for materials and equipment. We did mention on the last earnings call, we're working with leading suppliers of equipment to design the future higher scale version. So we have a blueprint to give to partners.

William Peterson analyst
#9

Maybe sticking on that blueprint, I guess, what have you proven internally that makes you confident that a partner can replicate at a higher scale? And I guess maybe with that, like how much of the process is sort of similar to an existing process?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#10

Great question. Let me start with that first. In a conventional lithium-ion plant, it really does 4 things. It makes a cathode, it makes an anode. It assembles a cell and it tests the cell. If you look at our process and then it imports the separator, it buys it. If you look at our process, we have no anode. All that equipment, all that bill of materials goes away. We have -- you can think of the cathode as being effectively conventional. The cell assembly, we stack. There's a combination of practice cylindrical cells are generally wound and then others stack or kind of do a process called Z-folding, so we stack. We would share the testing step except we simplify it quite a bit. Those lithium-ion cells upon being assembled and the liquid electrolyte put in will often sit for weeks as they're put through a charge and discharge cycle that helps form a passivating layer on that anode host material. It's called a solid electrolyte interphase. It chews up a bunch of active material. It ties up inventory and it's in pretty expensive equipment. I recall Tesla during their Battery Day some number of years ago pointed that is actually the most expensive factory. So we don't have an anode host material. We don't have a liquid electrolyte in the anode. So we can -- that basically becomes a quality control step for us. And then for us, the separator, you can't buy, we innovated on it. So that's why we're training up Murata and Corning. So that was the second part of your question. Remind me the first part.

William Peterson analyst
#11

Well, I guess what gives you confidence that you can replicate?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#12

Yes, the blueprint. So it's -- is it Georgia, which is the Show-Me State, which one?

William Peterson analyst
#13

That's Missouri.

Kevin Hettrich executive
#14

It's Missouri. Missouri is the Show-Me State. So there's an element of that Show-Me State theme of buy the equipment, develop the process and let me see it. So that's certainly part of it is partners and customers when they come visit the facility, they can see with their eyes every step, every tool, how it's made, the performance of the cells. So you can see where the bleeding edge is today. And then it's based off of running that equipment, identifying things we'd like to do different and better that leads to the next level of design. And it's actually working off of that line where we're working with the rest of the supply chain for materials and equipment. So it's kind of 2 parts. You can see that Show-Me feel. And then in working with the vendors, and you would recognize many of the names that we're working with because there's pretty good overlap from leaders in the lithium ion equipment space and then leaders in the ceramic equipment space is kind of who you'd expect we'd be working with.

William Peterson analyst
#15

Yes. So you described the capital-light commercialization approach. But I guess in practice, does this mean -- I think you alluded to as well, but licensing, JV manufacturing, tolling supply agreements, some kind of mix. I'm just trying to get a sense of what would be more like internal versus partnered out.

Kevin Hettrich executive
#16

Great question. So our internal focus what's core to us is development and taking things to a pilot line level of scale. At that point, development in this space is so intertwined between chemistry, between cell architecture, materials, process, and equipment, very independent -- interdependent. And as a result, it makes a lot of sense to do all that work under the same roof. Beyond a pilot line level of scale where you've shown it on a highly level -- on a highly automated set of equipment, it's repeatable, you then can argue that there's a real benefit to working with some of the highest quality manufacturers in the world to kind of take over the rest of the journey. That fits well, we think, for a few reasons. One is it hits their core competency. From a shareholder perspective, you avoid pretty heavy investments into large-scale factories. And those large-scale factories tend to -- you kind of invest in them a year or 2 before they start production. The first year is not usually a banner year in terms of the economics either. So just being able to focus on very high gross margin licensing in the longer term. And then as I mentioned before, we've been collecting customer billings as they're paying us cash to do development and sampling and demos custom to them, which is near-term validation for customers and for investors and a meaningful source of cash flow for us.

William Peterson analyst
#17

I think I'm familiar with the semiconductor industry, and we think of companies that used to have their own fabs and they outsource a lot of IP. How do you think about protecting your returns in IP while staying capital light?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#18

It's good. The semiconductor example is a good one where done well, you can have people focus on their spots in the value chain, like NVIDIA in terms of design, TSMC in terms of manufacturing, ASML in terms of equipment. And they benefit from the volume that each does. They've learned to kind of protect the IP there. So that is a business model that we look to in terms of a success case where we're trying to occupy that design and licensing spot at the upfront. So it's -- so how do you protect it? There's a few layers. So one is in terms of the development, we have over 300 patents and patent applications. And we put -- many of the innovations are not reverse engineerable. Those we protect as trade secrets. So that's kind of step 1. And then step 2 is to choose the right partners and to have the right incentives in place where everyone makes a great return in the success case, and they have incentive to protect the IP and to not more broadly reuse it. And then the third layer of protection is just speed is to -- as you -- success is bringing out the QSE-5 and achieving kind of market penetration with it. As we alluded to in our 2026 goals, we're going to talk about what's beyond it. What's very exciting is while the performance of lithium-ion has -- the performance gains have been kind of flattening out with time. We see that the QSE-5, our first product is just the start of our S curve. There's an anode and the cathode and the separator and a battery. The anode we've eliminated is manufactured is gone. Our separator is less than the thickness of a human hair, which of course, we can increase the size of that. We can make it even thinner and keep chipping away at the overhead of the cell. But a lot of the action in the future will go back to the cathode. So there's unique innovation, which only makes sense on that solid-state lithium metal platform, and that we see as the start of the new S curve.

William Peterson analyst
#19

That's great. You mentioned partners earlier. So let's move to partnerships. So I guess how should investors interpret the updated PowerCo agreement? What's changed? What's consistent? And what are the next observable milestones we should look out for?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#20

We've been working with Volkswagen since 2011, 2012, so more than a decade. The objective is the same, is to take QuantumScape's solid-state lithium metal technology and to commercialize it in automotive specifically within the VW Group where they have many of the most iconic brands and diversity from motorcycles to trucks to more volume cars, more premium cars, et cetera. So that is constant. The structure of the license, as I mentioned, up to 85 gigawatt hours. 5 gigawatt hours, interestingly -- and strategically, the VW Group has the ability to sell outside of the automotive market. So that's actually a fulfillment path outside of automotive for us. There's a $130 million prepay that we would earn with certain technical milestones being met, which is a kind of prepay on royalties. And there's up to $75 million -- there remains cash to be earned for this kind of custom development. So what's changed is we've updated the road map. I think the original agreement was 2 years ago, there was a licensing deal. Last year, we updated it. This year, we updated it again with the scope of work. So you can think of this as a bit as a living document. We took out some things that were motorcycle related given the cancellation of the MotoE race series, which had nothing to do with us, but there was some -- there was a fair amount of work that was kind of tied to it. So some billings went, some cash use went. So it's net neutral cash to us and this new road map better aligns to our development. And so it's more -- a little more automotive focused and it features development, including the larger form factor cells that VW has asked for.

William Peterson analyst
#21

Yes. I think there's -- so I guess how should we interpret the 2029 target? And what milestones that we should be looking out for?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#22

Yes. So key there are these technical milestones, bringing up Eagle line, producing higher volumes, maturing it certainly in that direction. And then that larger form factor cell development is also critical there. In the last earnings call, we had a photo showing our very high-volume Cobra process, producing larger area ceramic parts in significantly larger sizes than our kind of QSE-5, which is showing that the core technology and the important process by which we make the separator is consistent with those form factors. Because I didn't mention that before, as important as the cell innovation is, is that process innovation on the ceramic side, also something perhaps underappreciated. When we focused on automotive makes you think about highly scalable things that have entitlement to very high quality, very high volumes and very low cost points. That pushed us to think outside the box in terms of our ceramic process. The most expensive and most critical quality step in the ceramics process is the heat treatment, kind of makes intuitive sense. So we worked with a vendor to take one of their continuous tools and to speed it up by in order of magnitude called that Raptor. And the development team said, "Okay, I understand the knob that I'm turning to get there on speed. What if we cranked it even more." So that led to the Cobra process. We worked with a vendor to do a pretty innovative tool design, and we think that led to yet another order of magnitude of improvement. So relative to like continuous equipment that you can get in the ceramics industry, we think we're in order, if not 2 orders of magnitude faster than other ceramic improvement. And that is just as important of a body of IP as our cell development work.

William Peterson analyst
#23

I'll probably get to technology in a bit here in more detail. But I guess now you have the Honda partnership as well. So what's the importance of that? How does it differ in maturity from the PowerCo? And what are the next steps in that partnership?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#24

So Honda, one of the top 10 global OEMs, a fantastic product portfolio. Any of these automotive customers, just the potential volumes within them is ginormous, like many tens of gigawatt hours is possible within them. So that was the result of hands-on testing comparison of us against other competitive approaches around the world and kind of went with a public announcement with Honda that we're doing a multiyear research and development agreement with them. That is -- I mentioned their development expertise. They also have nonautomotive offerings, which kind of gives us some other avenues for these other kind of verticals. So we see it as a vote of a step forward with one of these 4 OEMs that there's enough confidence and excitement that now we're a named partner. It gives us -- each of these top 10 global OEMs is a massive opportunity themselves. So having kind of a second named one is important. And just kind of fresh validation from another name that we're kind of making forward progress and we're working on is very interesting.

William Peterson analyst
#25

Yes. How important is it to add any more auto customers? Or you feel pretty good about the 2 sort of...

Kevin Hettrich executive
#26

It's a good question. There's a -- so we have 2 names, and there's 2 other top 10 who are not yet named. We have talked about we like geographic diversity. So our goal would be amongst -- we've said amongst the top 4, there's a North American, there's a European and there's an Asian manufacturer. And there's -- between the 4 of them, it's such a large fraction of the market that, that's probably -- not that we wouldn't add another kind of suite. We could, but that's a very nice addressable market. So we will continue to engage people, but that's a pretty healthy share of the entire automotive market, and it's multi-hundred billion dollar TAM.

William Peterson analyst
#27

Yes. I'm going to come back to technology and sort of market segmentation, but I just want to see if there's any questions from the audience before moving forward. Can you use a microphone, please?

Unknown Analyst analyst
#28

Yes, can you hear me? Thanks for the question. Obviously, you said right now largely, your business is developing sampling and demos. Do you have any idea down the line what the cost difference would be for OEMs between solid-state lithium and lithium ion? So is that something that you see completely replacing lithium-ion? And then does that result in higher cost for customers in the long run?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#29

Good question. So with maturity and scale, we see this as cost advantaged. What's key to make that math work is we have an intrinsic win on the elimination of the anode material. So that's not only the graphite silicon host material, it's the liquid [ ion conductor that's in it ]. That's from a materials point of view and then all of the steps to make it. And then it's that formation simplification. So that's kind of -- that's -- the chemistry gives you that. And what's critical for us is as we substitute the separator, can you do that within the margin of the savings that you just created. The things we can point to that say we're on the path, still work to do is the bill of materials, we think is inherently low cost and the method of making with that Cobra process that it's a coating step and it's this very high speed that we see that being capable of very, very low kind of cost points. So our intent is to be higher performance in all the dimensions that you care about, which our partners would be able to -- you'd show up in better products. The ecosystem could charge a premium for that performance, but then at the same time, actually get the cost point at parity and then lower. You've got nice big, big margins for investors that encourages ecosystem partners to play. We would, of course, stop -- we would start with areas where we're adding the most value. So think like luxury and performance type segments. And as you hit kind of greater volumes and can come down the learning curve, it opens up broader and broader.

Unknown Analyst analyst
#30

I got a quick follow-up. You talked a minute ago about kind of turning that knob, and I'm not sure I completely understand the science but...

Kevin Hettrich executive
#31

For speed on the separator.

Unknown Analyst analyst
#32

Right. Is there a point where continuing to turn that knob becomes -- there's not as cost of advantages down the line?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#33

Yes. There are other vectors, though, that can result in speed that we haven't turned. So you're right, you get kind of diminishing returns on -- as you kind of -- every time you double, it gets harder and harder, but there's a lot of runway on a few different knobs. And that's actually one of the focuses of the Corning and Murata partnerships. When we were -- one of the reasons that they were excited to partner with us, it's a brand-new market for them. And then they saw the innovation on the Raptor and Cobra side, and we got feedback that we didn't think this was possible and kind of -- they got very excited and it's already been a very fruitful partnership. We're like, well, geez, when you do the next design, could we try this and this. So that's been -- there's dozens of engineers between our team and their teams like very actively working on that. I think there's a lot of runway there.

William Peterson analyst
#34

So I guess in addition to potential cost benefits that you described and less -- I guess, less complexity. But maybe coming back to technology. So where is the differentiation of your ceramic separator and anode-free, whether it be in terms of energy density, safety, you kind of mentioned manufacturability, cycle life or other factors.

Kevin Hettrich executive
#35

It's -- I love this question. So the separator is a means -- it gives a safety benefit, but the separator, the objective of it is purely to enable that lithium metal anode. So in a conventional battery, you have a cathode and you have an anode. And when you charge the cell, lithium goes into the cathode and then we charge it goes back -- when you -- sorry, when you charge it goes into the anode, you discharge it goes back down to the cathode. And it's just back and forth is how that works. As manufactured, we have nothing in the anode. We don't have the graphite, we don't have the silicon, don't have the liquid. So when you eliminate that as manufactured, that's weight and that's volume. So that's one of the key benefits. Second thing, power. Why do we charge faster? Two reasons. If you're lithium-ion going from one side of the device to the other, we just cut the distance in half. And if any of you -- all devices in lithium-ion in the world are designed to avoid -- they're limited in their charge rate by the speed with which lithium can go to the other side of the battery and then you throttle it back for the diffusion into the anode. We don't have an anode to diffuse into. So we have this like wonderful charge profile all the way up to like 80% state of charge in which we slow it down so you don't damage the cathode. So there's a fundamental charge advantage. Safety. The anode we eliminate is full of organic material, the graphite, the liquid electrolyte flammable, separator we replace. Another is a porous organic material. So just the elimination of organic material from the separator and from the anode, I think, is a big safety improvement. You see that in the last shareholder letter -- our shareholder letter and the safety improvement you see in terms of nail penetration and over discharge and things like the very, very high levels of heat, you can take our cells to a few hundred degrees Celsius and you damage them, but you don't see a safety event. Life, one of the 2 major sources of life loss occurs in the anode, which I mentioned we eliminate. And then cost, that was kind of the answer that we had before. So it's very elegant and you get these advantages by eliminating one of the materials as manufactured. The other thing I would just highlight is that the material that we eliminate graphite found in all lithium-ion cells, even if it's kind of a silicon cell, it still has a blend of graphite usually more than 50%, that material is 90%, 95% dominated by China. So just in terms of a simplification of supply chain or from a national security point of view, that elimination is, I think, very important.

William Peterson analyst
#36

Yes. It's kind of part of an earlier part in terms of scaling, but customers are obviously interested in larger form factors.

Kevin Hettrich executive
#37

That's right.

William Peterson analyst
#38

What's left to be proven to scale the large format cells?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#39

Good question. So there's -- we showed on the last earnings call that the separator itself can do it. What you should look to us in the future is to start -- would be to show cell data. We're actually seeing the build-outs of the larger cells on that. So there's some continued work on the separator. That was a nice step, but then you'll see us increasingly start to show component and then ultimately cell level data there.

William Peterson analyst
#40

So I want to come back to market segmentation. You talked about now being organized into 3 verticals: QSEV, data center D.C., and then I think A.S. Advanced Solutions or something like that. So I guess how do you allocate engineering and commercialization resources between EV and these other higher-performance markets?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#41

Great question. When we started the year, and we hadn't yet named the verticals, the goal was to advance into adjacent high-value markets, adjacent because it's something for which the QSE-5, which we developed for automotive is a very interesting product to kind of sample to get traction. That's true in both the data center and advanced solutions vertical. We're literally sampling QSE-5 cells made from our pilot line into these new spaces. Because we're utilizing the same tech platform and as of today, literally no modification to the cell, the incremental investment that's in our annual plan that's implicit in the guidance we've given the Street is really in sales, product development and engineering. So it's more of an incremental investment that kind of utilizes the technology platform we spent so much time and capital to develop. And the timing of us kind of stepping up some of the traction outside of the VW Group and announcing the other verticals is not a coincidence of that was with the start of our highly automated Eagle. That gives us the sampling volume to go after these other partners within automotive and beyond automotive.

William Peterson analyst
#42

I guess within data center, I guess, what type of companies are you partnering with in the value chain? What does the product look like? And I guess, how does the 800-volt transition sort of impact, I guess, even the interest in your product?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#43

So great question. So the 800-volt is a system architecture that automotive has been focused on for some time. And with the data center move there is a nice kind of market opportunity for us to target entry. So the application we're targeting is specifically battery backup and power supply that's in rack or rack adjacent. As the generations of cabinets evolve, the compute and the power supplies are able to make these very nice significant gains, the battery supply systems are not. They're not -- the lithium-ion is not having gains at a sufficiently high rate of pace to keep up. So they're having to give higher and higher amounts of volumes to batteries. And if you really want high performance and a great return on your GPUs, you want to give it exactly the power profile that it wants, which can be -- can change back and forth in tiny, tiny fractions of a second. Because of how quickly it changes back and forth, the supply of power has to be local. If it's given from a central source that's too far away, you can't react quickly enough. In fact, you can do the opposite of what the system wants. So the architectures are going for localized storage really adjacent to those GPUs. So intuitively, what do you want? You want wonderful volumetric energy density because of the opportunity cost of the real estate there. You want great power, we talked about how that was an advantage of ours and safety. Billions of dollars of capital equipment sitting there. So there's a pretty high premium on safety. That combination is structural to the chemistry, and we think a really nice fit, especially with this shift to an 800-volt architecture, which we've seen in automotive. We think it's a really interesting kind of market opportunity. So we've been -- we're Silicon Valley-based. We have -- like half of the leadership is former semiconductors. These are kind of the circles that we know. So it's having conversations everywhere in terms of those setting the architectures of the future to understand where the industry is going, the kind of hyperscalers themselves as well as having conversations with the ODMs in terms of who you'd actually work with to get into those power supply battery backup units that we're targeting.

William Peterson analyst
#44

Yes. As we wrap up, I guess, what should investors be looking out for the next 12 to 18 months? And again, maybe if there's anything the market is missing just as we wrap up here?

Kevin Hettrich executive
#45

Yes. I would point to 3 things. So one, that Eagle line is important to all paths of commercialization to look out for those metrics that we've talked about, doubling output over the rest of the year, continue to make progress on those efficiency metrics and fleshing out the rest of the supply chain, be it with Corning and Murata and with announcements elsewhere. It's all about commercial forward progress. That's within automotive, if it's with Volkswagen and Honda and the other 2 top 10 OEMs and then look for announcements and progress in those other 2 new spaces, data centers and advanced solutions. And then finally, we did say one of our goals is to go beyond the QSE-5. So we'll put that next point on the -- our S curve.

William Peterson analyst
#46

Great. Well, Kevin, for sure out of time. We really appreciate your sharing your insights. Thank you.

Kevin Hettrich executive
#47

Thank you everybody.

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