Windrose, the Chinese electric truck start-up with production plans in the Port of Antwerp, is looking to innovate in the AI sector with containerized data centers and battery backup systems. Founder & CEO Wen Han took to LinkedIn to float the idea… using AI artwork and very little concrete data.
Windrose has faced many hurdles on its road to producing electric heavy trucks, but the latest news is positive. The company has secured a European homologation for its e-trucks, which claim 670 km of range and a competitive €250,000 price tag.
Plus, the factory location in the Port of Antwerp was chosen last month, with production set to begin this year.
AI in a box
But the mind of an entrepreneur never seems to stop. Founder & CEO Wen Han has posted his latest idea on LinkedIn: “AI in a box”. It consists of a two-container solution with batteries and computing power, which can be transported anywhere by a single Windrose truck.
The first container has 4 MWh of battery capacity on board, providing up to a megawatt of backup power. The second container houses the compute chips, delivering 0.5 MW of inference power in a standard ISO container.
The idea (although Han does not mention this in his post) is that these battery and compute containers could be transported easily to deploy small-scale data centers in remote locations quickly, or to temporarily add compute and battery power to existing data centers that need it.
No concrete plans
To illustrate the idea, Han generated an image with Google’s Gemini AI. And while the basic idea is clear, the AI made some strange estimates. In the first image, cables are seen deployed across the road of an industrial estate. The second image shows the truck in more detail, but it features what looks like a Tesla Semi 4×2, while Windrose plans to build only 6.4 trucks with a very different design.
With no concrete plans to implement this “AI in a box” idea, or even to explain what it would be useful for, it seems more like a thought bubble than a new business venture for Windrose. And the company has enough on its hands trying to launch its electric trucks anyway.
