Would you trade your golf cart for this hilarious four-wheeled Chinese golf scooter?
Golf carts are becoming much more popular these days, even off of the greens, for their use as alternative transportation. But would you be prepared to give up your four-wheeled golf cart for a much smaller (yet still four-wheeled) electric scooter?
It’s a bit wacky, but that makes it just right for this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column.
I’m a card-carrying member of the I Love Golf Carts alliance, or at least I would be if such a club existed. They’re just such cool vehicles for their combination of utility and efficiency. Who needs a car when you can get around in an air-open vehicle for a fraction of the cost and with zero emissions?
But it appears that even a golf cart might be too big for some people, based on how a group of Chinese engineers decided to rethink the vehicle to create an even smaller footprint.
Meet the golf scooter, a pint-sized device that could fold up to fit on the bench of a typical golf cart.
Unlike a traditional electric scooter, this one has double the wheels to create a more stable platform. There’s no need to put a foot down when you stop, at least not unless you’re stopping on a particularly steep section.
Though even there they claim that a parking brake feature will keep you solidly planted. I’ll let someone else test that feature out.
Two of the four wheels apparently sport 2,000W motors, meaning you’ve got 4 kW or just over 5 horsepower beneath your feet, neatly tucked away in something that looks like a children’s toy. That’s a similar power level to real golf carts, and so this would make for a great drag race event!
The entire vehicle only weighs 36 kg (79 lb) yet can hit a blistering top speed of up to 25 km/h (15 mph). Ok, so perhaps that’s not terribly fast, but at least it’s got an effective range of over 45 km (28 miles).
That range is sufficient to make this little four-wheeled electric scooter effective even off of the golf course. I could see this being a handy utility vehicle. Instead of a golf club bag, you could swap a shopping bag into its place and scoot around your local grocery store performing the weekly shopping run.
Or perhaps you just need to get even more creative. This may look like a one-person vehicle to the untrained eye. But the out-of-the-box thinkers among us might just be able to turn it into a family vehicle for dropping the kids off at school.
There’s even a version with an attached umbrella so your kid doesn’t get wet. I mean, they may serve as a mudguard from the front, but at least their hair will stay dry!
And if you’re still not sold, then wait until you see the price. While even a cheap golf cart will run you around US $9,000 these days, the four-wheeled golf scooter here is priced at a reasonable $999. But as my savvy Alibaba-post readers will know, you can often do even better when shopping in bulk. If you are prepared to take delivery of 100 of these blessed contraptions, you can drop the price down to a cool $850. I know, I know… How can you afford NOT to?!
Ok, joking aside, please don’t try and buy one of these things. I often intend to remind folks that this series is largely tongue-in-cheek and that buying any large purchase sight unseen from halfway around the world is fraught with peril. I’ve had some awesome successes doing this myself, but I’ve also had some dismal failures that left me out some serious cash. That’s why these Alibaba products should probably remain an amusing intellectual exercise, nothing more.
So, while it’s fun to enjoy imagining what it’d be like to cruise the links on a Chinese four-wheeled e-scooter, this is one that’s probably best left on the computer screen. But if you do ignore my warnings, as my readers often seem keen to do, definitely let me know when it’s time to open the box. I’d be fascinated to see it!
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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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