Driving an electric vehicle through northern North Dakota just got a whole lot less fraught on April 16, when a new fast-charging station went live at a Simonson Station Store gas station in Minot, near a Red Wing boot shop.

Zero-emission drivers around El Paso, Texas, can also rest easy thanks to two new stations down the road in Deming, New Mexico. And so can anyone driving along the Gulf Coast through Mobile, Alabama, where a new bank of chargers began pumping out electrons on May 2 in Robertsdale, just down the street from Buster’s Southern Pit BBQ.

America’s EV charging deserts continued to disappear in the second quarter, as a motley crew of networks turned on 704 new public fast-charging stations, a 9% increase over three months, according to a Bloomberg Green analysis of Department of Energy data. There are now nearly 9,000 public fast-charging locations in the U.S.

At the current pace, public fast-charging sites will surpass the number of gas stations in the U.S. in about eight years, but the momentum for chargers is only expected to increase. North American operators will collectively spend $6.1 billion on charging infrastructure this year, nearly double their investment in 2023, according to BloombergNEF estimates. That annual spending is expected to double again by 2030.

“We’re seeing a huge increase in demand for fast charging,” said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president at EVgo Inc., which operates nearly 1,000 stations in the U.S. “We’re continuing to build bigger and bigger stations because we have to meet that demand.”

EV cables are increasingly being added by retailers eager to attract the nearly 10% of U.S. car buyers who are switching to battery vehicles. Gas station operators in particular are jumping on the electric bandwagon. In the second quarter, Shell opened 30 new charging stations, while Enel opened 11, Pilot Travel Centers opened eight and another seven popped up at Flying J rest stops, according to federal tallies.

“We’re past an inflection point where gas stations and convenience stores are really seeing the value proposition,” said Sam Houston, senior vehicle analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s a very welcome turnaround from how they were behaving in the regulatory space even just a few years ago.”

US Bank also sees EV charging as a business development: It turned on chargers at 39 California locations in the second quarter. Meanwhile, Waffle House added charging cords to parking lots at two of its Florida restaurants.

While much has been said about a slowdown in demand for electric vehicles in the U.S., retailers have good reason to see chargers as a customer magnet: More and more drivers are switching to electric. In April, the International Energy Agency estimated that sales of all-electric vehicles in the U.S. will rise to 2.5 million by 2025, from 1.1 million last year.

“It’s worth remembering that the number of electric vehicles sold (in the first quarter) is roughly equal to the number of vehicles sold in all of 2020,” EVgo CEO Badar Khan said during an earnings call on May 7.

Meanwhile, charging stations are getting busy enough to start making money. At the end of the first quarter, the average U.S. fast-charging station was plugged into a car 18% of the time — nearly five hours a day, according to Stable Auto, a charging network consultant. Stable estimates that a charging station needs to pump electrons about 15% of the time to turn a profit.

EVgo says demand is being driven by people driving their electric vehicles further than they used to, and by a larger share of EV owners living in multi-unit developments, where they often can’t charge at home. Newer EVs can also charge faster than older models, Rafalson pointed out, encouraging more drivers to charge up in the wild. The company’s fastest-growing markets are Texas and Florida, followed by Michigan and Arizona.

The second-quarter charging blitz was fueled in part by the Biden administration’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula program, a $5 billion plan to plug gaps in the charging map. It’s still early days, but the NEVI program is already in the crosshairs of former U.S. President Donald Trump: In an interview with Businessweek , Trump claimed the White House spent $8 billion to open just seven chargers.

Eight NEVI-supported stations opened in six states in the second quarter, but those numbers are expected to grow quickly. Some 23 states have awarded contracts or signed agreements for another 550 stations, according to the government.

Still, charging anxiety remains one of the biggest concerns for drivers who are hesitant to buy an EV. Houston of the Union of Concerned Scientists says that’s partly because there’s still a big gap between perception and reality. Most drivers have no idea how many charging cords are actually lying around them.

“You have some anecdotes that suggest that charging is not happening and that’s being confused with charging in general,” Houston said. “It’s important to make sure people know how quickly these stations are coming online.”