Helsing ramps up drone factories across Europe
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German defence company Helsing has completed the first of a series of factories to build up to 6000 drones across Europe.
The first Resilience Factory (RF-1) has been completed in Southern Germany and is the first of multiple Resilience Factories planned. The first factory can produce 1000 drones a month to meet an order for 6,000 HX-2 drones for delivery to Ukraine. This follows a previous order of 4,000 HF-1 strike drones which are currently being delivered to Ukraine, which has made 1.5m of its own drones as part of its war with Russia. The UK is also sending 30,000 drones to the region in a £45m deal.
“We are taking a distributed approach towards mass manufacturing these systems across Europe, allowing individual nation states to produce locally and ensure sovereignty of production and supply chain,” said Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of Helsing
“We have assembled Europe’s world-leading manufacturing talent to completely rethink and develop a new generation of mass producible effects. Our Resilience Factories combine software-first design with scalable manufacturing techniques. We solve the hard problems in the software layer, not the electronics. HX-2 is just the first of a whole range of products based on this premise,” said Niklas Köhler, fellow co-founder.
The HX-2 is an electrically propelled X-wing drone with a range of up to 100 km range. It includes on-board AI for resistance to electronic warfare and can operate as a swarm controlled by a single human operator.
Resilience Factories are Helsing’s high-efficiency production facilities designed to provide nation states with local and sovereign manufacturing capacities. Helsing is set to build Resilience Factories across the European continent, with the ability to scale manufacturing rates to tens of thousands of units in case of a conflict.
“We are scaling up production of HX-2 in response to additional orders from Ukraine, where precision mass is offsetting a numerical disadvantage in legacy systems on a daily basis,” said Scherf.
Helsing has also announced AI deals with Mistral and satellite maker Loft.
The deal with combine Helsing’s military AI used in the HX-2 and Eurofighter with Mistral’s generative AI models for human-AI collaboration on the battlefield. The joint development work will focus on Vision-Language-Action models, enabling defence platforms to understand their environment, communicate naturally with operators, and allow for faster, more reliable decisions in complex scenarios.
The deal with Loft Orbital will see AI used in satellites for real-time intelligence and situational awareness. The constellation will consist of multiple Loft satellites carrying multi-sensor payloads, including cameras and RF sensors. These payloads will use Helsing’s on-orbit AI processing to detect, identify, and classify military assets worldwide from Low Earth Orbit in real-time.
Unlike traditional satellite intelligence systems that rely on post-mission data processing, this constellation will deliver immediate insights through onboard AI processing. High revisit rates from the LEO orbits will ensure continuous monitoring of key areas, while short response times and real-time alerts will give military decision-makers an operational advantage.
The satellite buses are already under production and slots have been agreed for launches in 2026.
www.helsing.ai; www.mistral.ai; www.loftorbital.com
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