At the Huaneng Yimin Open-Pit Coal Mine in Inner Mongolia, China has switched on the world’s first fleet of 100 fully autonomous, all-electric mining trucks. Commissioned in May 2025, the driverless XCMG ZNK95 haulers — branded ‘Huaneng Ruichi’ — run with no one in the cab, coordinated over a Huawei 5G-Advanced (5G-A) network built for the site. This coal mine in Inner Mongolia is running 100 giant haul trucks — and there’s no one in a single cab. This is the Huaneng Yimin Open-Pit Coal Mine — home to the world’s first fleet of 100 fully autonomous, all electric mining trucks. They’re XCMG ZNK95 haulers, branded ‘Huaneng Ruichi’ — switched on in May 2025, running with empty cabs. A control room supervises the whole fleet over a Huawei 5G-Advanced network — the first openpit mine to run mining at this scale on the cloud. Around 500 megabits up and just 20 milliseconds of lag means the mine sees and steers every truck in real time. They’re fully electric — zero tailpipe — and swap an empty battery for a full one in under six minutes, hauling almost non-stop. And they do it in brutal cold — operations have run as low as minus 48.5 degrees Celsius. Huaneng says the fleet set records for payload, speed and cold — and runs about 20% more productively than human crews ADVERTISEMENT