T.J. Rogers, founder of former Cypress Semiconductor is forging global strategic alliances and hunting acquisition targets to restore the SunPower brand to solar-business greatness.
T.J. Rodgers is once again merrily ensconced in his high-stakes business groove – as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a corporate fix-up specialist and a mergers-and-acquisition wizard.
The 77-year-old Rodgers spoke with pv magazine USA about how he is tapping deep wells of experience from doing decades of semiconductor and solar business battle, including founding the former Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and playing pivotal roles in the original variation of solar giant SunPower.
Rodgers expounds on his juggling act to elevate a new version of SunPower, as he glimpses one of his several vineyards sprawling over a Santa Cruz Mountains slope through a window of his home in Woodside, Calif., overlooking Stanford University and San Francisco Bay. The Silicon Valley berg, he points out, once was home to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
SunPower has yet to announce an important new partnership with REC Group, a Singapore-based manufacturer of solar wafers, cells and modules. But Rodgers nevertheless outlines the strategic alliance as one that will reach well beyond its role as SunPower’s new primary source of solar gear. SunPower and REC will collaborate on developing solar systems and components, putting them into production and refining them, Rodgers says.
“It’s a classic company-vendor relationship that you would find in the tech industry,” said Rodgers.
Rodgers also highlights a pending corporate-acquisition drive to “inorganically grow” the company’s revenue through corporate acquisitions while rounding out its portfolio of technological and functional capabilities.
“We’re going to acquire,” Rodgers says.
Rodgers considers himself a “world-class” veteran of corporate acquisitions, not the least of which was his Complete Solaria, Inc. takeover of key assets from the bankrupt SunPower in September. At Cypress, he says he presided over 26 acquisitions.
Naturally, he holds the size of SunPower’s buyout war chest and number of intended buyouts close to his vest. But he allows that he had just gotten off the phone with one potential target and expected to spend the next business day reviewing another.
Rodgers dates back a quarter-century with SunPower. To help keep the company afloat in 2001, he personally invested $750,000 (worth $1.35 million now). The following year, Cypress – with Rodgers then as its CEO – invested $8.8 million (nearly $16 million today) for a 44% stake in the company. Cypress acquired full ownership of SunPower by late 2004, SunPower went public on the Nasdaq Stock Market in 2005 and Rodgers served as chairman until 2012.
After Complete Solar and The Solaria Corp. merged to become Complete Solaria in 2023, Rodgers began investing in the combined company, becoming its executive chairman. He added the title of chief executive officer a year ago. The company aimed to offer end-to-end solar solutions, including design, financing, installation, and service, primarily targeting residential and small commercial customers across the U.S. market.
When SunPower shrank into bankruptcy in August, Rodgers took another run at it. Complete Solaria invested $45 million to buy several key assets, including its residential unit, Blue Raven Solar; its solar-integration unit, New Homes Division; and its Non-installing Dealer Network.
Six weeks ago, Complete Solaria announced that it would holistically rebrand under the SunPower’s well-trusted and high-visibility name, though other corporate interests overseas have retained legal rights to use the name outside the U.S. market.
In the U.S. market, the SunPower brand has inestimable solar-industry cache, Rodgers says, making the management of “a laundry list” of rebranding details at all points in the market chain connecting the company and consumers worth the investment.
“The SunPower brand is going to make my shareholders a lot of money,” he says.
On April 22, Complete Solaria began trading as SunPower under the brand’s same former ticker symbol, SPWR, on the Nasdaq.
In mid-May, SunPower took out a $180,000 full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal to reintroduce the brand. The ad featured the company’s new Helios logo, inspired by NASA’s solar-powered aircraft and symbolizing its commitment to innovation.
“Now we’re turning the image into the reality of the company,” Rodgers says.
SunPower recently relocated its headquarters from Fremont, Calif., to Salt Lake City, Utah. The latter is home to the well-reputed, top-tier Blue Raven, now lightly rebranded as “Blue Raven Solar, A SunPower Company,” along with variations in some states. But Salt Lake also is the location of a concentration of employees from the prior iteration of SunPower, Rodgers says. In all, the company employs around 900 people.
Partly through key acquisitions and hires, Rodgers aims for SunPower to return to a technological focus, not unlike the corporate emphasis that built the original SunPower, he says. Rodgers believes that the decades-long flood of inexpensive, largely indifferentiable solar gear from China has shifted the industry’s center of gravity from technological prowess to high-volume selling. But he said technology, not just sales, fundamentally drives success long term.
The industry now dishes out its richest rewards to top sales performers, not technological or product innovators, Rodgers says, and top former sales performers, not top engineering innovators, run many of the industry’s companies.
“The solar industry has lost its technical edge,” Rodgers says.
Whereas the chip industry measured its product flaws in rates of low single digits per million, he said, quality problems are comparatively pervasive across the solar industry.
To make matters worse, he says, poor business management likely figured prominently in the failures of 70 solar companies that he says went out of business in 2023 and 2024. Rodgers calls the statistic a “red flag,” not unlike how a school of fish washing up dead on a beach signals a systemic problem. Rodgers quips that some nearby taco stands he has frequented run better than many solar businesses.
Possessing a doctoral electrical-engineering degree focusing on solid-state electronics from Stanford University, Rodgers wants the reformulated SunPower to target cutting-edge renewable-energy systems encompassing solar, storage and monitoring with such great sophistication that homeowners can direct how they specifically deploy solar-produced electrons for use within their homes.
“SunPower is going to go back to being a technology company,” he says.
Toward that end, Rodger intends for SunPower to adopt a time-honored strategy: “Do all the R&D you can and still make a profit.”
For Rodgers, his SunPower aims boil down to the same fundamentals he has managed for decades: Start a business, build a team, align their interests using stock incentives, make inroads into the market, outsmart the competition and train managers – rinse and repeat.
Rodgers acknowledges that the solar industry stands on the shaky footing of federal solar-policy uncertainties. But while lawmakers revising solar-industry tax incentives have “huffed and puffed” about cutting and altering incentives, he says, nothing has gelled yet.
In response, Rodgers has run worst-case-scenario traps to make sure that regardless of what final approach Congress adopts, SunPower will continue making a profit, he says. The company returned to black ink in the first quarter of 2025 for the first time in four years, netting $1.3 million in profit on $80.2 million in sales. “We’re a profitable company, and we’re not going to become not profitable,” Rodgers vows.
Meantime, through his many investment and professional experiences, Rodgers has cribbed countless ideal ways to handle corporate tasks, down to the development scheduling approach he has borrowed from E. & J. Gallow Winery, one of the world’s largest wine producers.
“The difference now,” he allowed, “is I have more to bring to the party.”
