Amazon.com Inc. has locked in a call option on a Canadian battery maker, taking warrants that could lift its stake above 20 percent if it spends US$280 million on forklift cells over the next decade. The deal, disclosed Wednesday by Mississauga-based Electrovaya Inc., hands Amazon roughly 13.8 million warrants priced at the five-day volume-weighted average preceding the agreement. A tranche vests immediately; the rest only converts if the purchasing threshold is met. Amazon currently owns zero equity.
Electrovaya’s revenue jumped to US$63.8 million in 2025 from $44.6 million a year earlier, and the company swung to a US$3.4 million profit from a US$1.5 million loss. Nearly every dollar still comes from material-handling batteries, the kind that power forklifts running three shifts a day. Chief executive Raj DasGupta argues his ceramic-separator technology survives that punishment better than cheaper alternatives, a claim the market rewarded with a 38.4 percent single-day pop to US$10.90.
The partnership is less a vote of confidence in today’s financials than a bet on adjacency. DasGupta wants Amazon’s data centres buying Electrovaya storage cells by 2027, and the robotics line is already shipping. A new cell plant in Jamestown, N.Y., is under construction to feed that ambition. Amazon, for its part, gets price-protected supply for its warehouse fleet and a free lottery ticket on the energy-storage pivot.
Skepticism is warranted. Electrovaya tried the automotive route once, government contracts, a German plant, and exited in 2018 after losses DasGupta describes as a “race to the bottom.” The company’s current niche, mission-critical industrial gear, is real but narrow. Data-centre storage is a different beast: longer duration, different chemistry, and competitors with far deeper balance sheets.
The warrants structure tells its own story. Amazon pays nothing up front for the upside; it only pays if the commercial relationship scales. If the US$280 million target looks generous against trailing revenue of US$63.8 million, that is the point, the number is a hurdle, not a forecast. DasGupta called the deal an “exciting inflection point.” Whether it inflects toward a diversified industrial supplier or just a larger forklift vendor is the only question that matters.