“As part of the vendor program, Birch Lake has also provided financing to FF for the company to pay all past due amounts for approximately 60 percent of FF’s vendor base, including smaller vendors who are owed less than $20,000,” the company wrote. Meanwhile, larger suppliers will be able to exchange unsecured debt for “trust interests” that will include a repayment schedule.

To secure the financing, Faraday said it valued its intellectual property at $1.25 billion. The company plans to use The9’s cash to build the V9 EV, a version of the Faraday FF91 for the Chinese market. It has promised to build 300,000 of the EVs per year by 2020, and said it has a growing fleet of FF91 pre-production test vehicles.

Behind the scenes, FF continues its work on its preproduction test vehicles. With its growing fleet of preproduction vehicles being used as a testbed for cloud-connectivity, software releases and other validation measures, the engineering team has made steady progress to finalize FF 91 for production.

However, it’s hard to take that seriously considering that Tesla only cracked 300,000 deliveries last year and has been in business since 2003 (and doing so almost broke CEO Elon Musk). That’s on top of the fact that Faraday had to sell its LA headquarters for $10 million to stay afloat, and put its $40 million Las Vegas property — where the FF91 was to be built — up for sale.

It has lost many of its key senior executives and earlier this year, failed to raise the cash needed to bring back furloughed workers. Finally, CEO Jia Yueting is facing lawsuits over debt issues with his other companies, including LeEco. However, despite its problems and lack of success building vehicles, it shows that the company still has a talent for finding new investors.

The news is pretty surprising, considering Faraday’s messy relationship with its last partner, Chinese real estate firm Evergrande. That company promised $2 billion, but withdrew the offer after Faraday blew through the initial $800 million payment more quickly than expected. A promise of further financing collapsed, in part, over the condition that Faraday founder Jia Yueting remove himself as director of various offshore companies.

They resolved the dispute at the end of 2018, with Evergrande assuming the rights to Faraday Future’s potential EV sales in China. In exchange, Faraday regained control over its own assets, enabling it to obtain other loans and sources of equity financing. That, presumably, is where The9 comes in. It will make an initial $5 million deposit to help Faraday Future bridge “short-term cash flow difficulties,” with the remaining $595 million contingent on further, unspecified funding.

Faraday Future’s main asset is its FF91 pre-production vehicle that ate up a lot of that financing. The vehicle has hit speeds of up to 155 MPH during trials, but reportedly caught fire during a Faraday event, setting back development. Now, the company has to get back to preparing it for production. After its dispute with Evergrande, however, it lost many of its employees and engineers to Rivian, which recently unveiled an electric pickup truck and SUV. Considering all that Faraday has gone through, it would be quite a miracle if it ever produced any EVs.