European defense company Helsing has announced the production of 6,000 HX-2 strike drones for delivery to Ukraine. Previously, it developed 4,000 HF-1 strike UAVs, which are already being supplied to Ukrainian forces.
Unveiled in late 2024, the HX-2 is a high-precision, X-wing electric-powered strike drone with a range of up to 100 km. It features advanced onboard artificial intelligence, making it fully resistant to electronic warfare. The HX-2 is capable of targeting artillery, armored vehicles, and other military assets.
Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of Helsing, said: “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. It is clear that NATO has important lessons to learn, and fast. With our Resilience Factories, 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.”
Helsing also announced the completion of its first "Resilience Factory" in southern Germany. These high-efficiency manufacturing facilities are designed to provide nations with local production capabilities. Helsing plans to establish Resilience Factories across Europe, with the ability to scale production to tens of thousands of units in the event of conflict.
The first factory (RF-1) in southern Germany has an initial monthly production capacity of over 1,000 HX-2 drones.
Niklas Köhler, co-founder of Helsing said: “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. This generates affordable precision mass, deters adversaries, and protects our democracies. HX-2 is just the first of a whole range of products based on this premise.“
