This tiny electric dump truck is ready to dump a big load, for cheap!
When it comes to all of the category-defying EVs out there that earn the infamous title of Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle the Week, the utility vehicles might just be my favorite. The ability to simultaneously be super weird and also get work done is an endearing quality, and it’s one that this week’s feature surely embodies. Say “hello!” to the world’s cutest electric dump truck.
It’s hard to say for sure exactly what we’re looking at here.
It appears to be a four-wheeled vehicle with rear wheel drive, a basic ladder frame, and a big ol’ bucket on back connected to a hydraulic ram.
In other words, it’s a super simple dump truck. Though the word “truck” is likely doing some heavy lifting here.
But why butcher the description of this marvelous vehicle when I can let the Alibaba vendor butcher their own description:
“Four wheel dumper truck used for cargo Dump truck is our main product.
It using electric as power source in mining, brickyard, sanitation and cleaning. It has been improved many times with the advantage of large power, long work hours, heavy load and suitable for any road, well received by the customer’s favorite.we have sold our products to United States, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Chile, Peru, Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Mexico, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India and etc.”
Well there you go, folks. It’s their main product, so you know they must be good at it.
There are four versions of the little truck, though the larger versions don’t sound very “little” anymore.
They offer motor power levels of 1 kW, 2 kW, 3 kW and for those that want to go nuts: 7kW.
Weight appears to increase considerably from the 520 kg (1,150 lb) little guy up to that 1,400 kg (3,100 lb) 7,000W beast.
The loading capacity is also quite impressive, with the little guy capable of carrying nearly twice its own weight and the big guy rated for just over twice its own weight. These things are like ants, tiny but mighty!
The tires don’t look particular up to par, at least not if you’re going to be driving through any particularly sandy or rocky work sites. But if your dumping requirements involve a lot of tarmac and smooth surfaces, then I just might have the dump truck for you!
And you have to admit that the thing is pretty cute. Those headlights give it a countenance that is just begging for a little augmentation.
With a paintbrush and a couple minutes, I feel like I could whip up a decent little face to match this thing’s bubbly personality.
But perhaps the best part of this whole ordeal is the price. Somehow they’ve got this listed at $1,950, with discounts for bulk orders bringing the price down to just $1,450.
If you’re wondering how that’s possible, I can tell you from my own experience of ordering weird electric trucks from China that you’ll never get out the door for that price. That’s likely the price without batteries, and a good lithium battery could add 50% to the cost before you even get out of the factory.
Then you’ve got many thousands of dollars in shipping, freight, customs bonds, ISF filings, warehouse fees and more, not to mention paying a customs broker to handle all the import paperwork for you.
In the end, I’d be surprised to see this thing land stateside for under $7-8k, but even that might be a steal compared to what a “real” dump truck costs. For the price of an American-sized ride, you could buy a whole factory of these little dumpers. And by the looks of things, they’re ready to pack several containers full of them for you.
Just remember that the face paint isn’t included.
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Charging network IONNA is partnering with Casey’s, one of the US’s largest convenience store and pizza chains, to bring DC fast charging to EV drivers across the Midwest.
Starting this year, Casey’s customers can plug into IONNA’s 400 kW charging stations while grabbing a slice or stocking up on road-trip essentials. Eight “Rechargeries” are already under construction in six states and are expected to open in 2025:
- Little Rock, Arkansas
- Vernon Hills, Illinois
- McHenry, Illinois
- Terre Haute, Indiana
- Parkville, Missouri
- Kearney, Missouri
- Blackwell, Oklahoma
- Waco, Texas
The Casey’s deal pushes IONNA past 900 charging bays in construction or operation — more than double what it had just three months ago. IONNA says the partnership will “expand,” but doesn’t provide specifics.
“This partnership with Casey’s is key to expanding our presence in America’s heartland,” said IONNA CEO Seth Cutler. “With a shared respect and commitment to delivering quality customer experience, we are pleased to add Casey’s to our growing network of partners.”
IONNA is a joint venture backed by eight of the world’s biggest automakers – BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota – working to rapidly scale a DC fast-charging network in the US.
Read more: Wawa is getting ultra-fast EV chargers from IONNA
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Anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership Thursday, a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.
The deal, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, is the company’s largest TPU commitment yet and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity online in 2026.
Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips.
While competitors tout even loftier projections — OpenAI’s 33-gigawatt “Stargate” chief among them — Anthropic’s move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle.
Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.
A key to Anthropic’s infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture.
The company’s Claude family of language models runs across Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research.
Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic “strong price-performance and efficiency.”
“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao in a release.
Anthropic’s ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints.
According to a person familiar with the company’s infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.
Google, for its part, is leaning into the partnership.
“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand its usage of TPUs reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency its teams have seen with TPUs for several years,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a release, touting the company’s seventh-generation “Ironwood” accelerator as part of a maturing portfolio.
Claude’s breakneck revenue growth
Anthropic’s escalating compute demand reflects its explosive business growth.
The company’s annual revenue run rate is now approaching $7 billion, and Claude powers more than 300,000 businesses — a staggering 300× increase over the past two years. The number of large customers, each contributing more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.
Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding assistant, generated $500 million in annualized revenue within just two months of launch, which Anthropic claims makes it the “fastest-growing product” in history.
While Google is powering Anthropic’s next phase of compute expansion, Amazon remains its most deeply embedded partner.
The retail and cloud giant has invested $8 billion in Anthropic to date, more than double Google’s confirmed $3 billion in equity.
Still, AWS is considered Anthropic’s chief cloud provider, making its influence structural and not just financial.
Its custom-built supercomputer for Claude, known as Project Rainier, runs on Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips. That shift matters not just for speed, but for cost: Trainium avoids the premium margins of other chips, enabling more compute per dollar spent.
Wall Street is already seeing results.
Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Alex Haissl estimated that Anthropic added one to two percentage points to AWS’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter and this year’s first, with its contribution expected to exceed five points in the second half of 2025.
Wedbush’s Scott Devitt previously told CNBC that once Claude becomes a default tool for enterprise developers, that usage flows directly into AWS revenue — a dynamic he believes will drive AWS growth for “many, many years.”
Google, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role. In January, the company agreed to a new $1 billion investment in Anthropic, adding to its previous $2 billion and 10% equity stake.
Critically, Anthropic’s multicloud approach proved resilient during Monday’s AWS outage, which did not impact Claude thanks to its diversified architecture.
Still, Anthropic isn’t playing favorites. The company maintains control over model weights, pricing, and customer data — and has no exclusivity with any cloud provider. That neutral stance could prove key as competition among hyperscalers intensifies.
WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents
Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO and cofounder JB Straubel, has raised $350 million in new funding to scale its US-made battery storage systems and critical materials operations. The company is ramping up to meet surging demand from AI data centers and the clean energy sector.
The oversubscribed Series E round was led by Eclipse, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and other new strategic investors.
As global supplies tighten, the US is racing to secure domestic production of critical materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper. In July, Redwood and GM signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to turn new and second-life GM batteries into energy storage systems. Redwood launched a new venture in June called Redwood Energy that repurposes both new and used EV battery packs into fast and cost-effective energy storage systems.
Redwood says large-scale battery storage is the fastest and most scalable way to enable new AI data center rollout while unlocking stranded generation capacity and stabilizing the grid. Battery storage also helps industrial facilities electrify and balance renewable energy output. The company aims to deliver a new generation of affordable, US-built energy storage systems designed to serve the grid, heavy industry, and AI data centers, reducing dependence on imported Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.
Redwood will use the new capital to expand energy storage deployments, refining and materials production capacity, and its engineering and operations teams.
Read more: Redwood is repurposing GM’s EV batteries into energy storage
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Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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