The main drawbacks of vanadium oxide as a cathode material are its low conductivity, low practical capacity and poor cycling stability. Adding Cr can improve its conductivity and a metastable amorphous state may provide higher capacity and stability. In this work, metastable amorphous Cr-V-O nanoparticles have been successfully prepared through a facile co-precipitation reaction followed by annealing treatment. As a cathode material for lithium batteries, the metastable amorphous Cr-V-O nanoparticles exhibit high capacity (260 mAh/g at 100 mA/g between 1.5–4 V), low capacity loss (more than 80% was retained after 200 cycles at 100 mA/g) and high rate capability (up to 3 A/g).