That’s Foxconn president Liu Young-way going way beyond the boundaries of traditional mathematics. | Image: Getty
It has never been clear what Foxconn is attempting to do in Wisconsin, and every time the company or one of its executives tries to explain it, things have just gotten weirder. For example, the company has said for years that its empty warehouse in southeastern Wisconsin is the centerpiece of an “AI 8K+5G” strategy, without ever explaining what that means. (Nothing. It means nothing.)
Anyway, throw that mystery out of your brain because AI 8K+5G has been completely scrubbed from Foxconn’s Wisconsin website. Instead, get ready for “3+3=∞,” which is Foxconn’s new strategy, or Foxconn 3.0, which the company claims follows the famous and beloved Foxconn 1.0 and Foxconn 2.0 strategies that totally made sense and revolutionized the industrial economy of southeastern Wisconsin.
Sorry! That never happened. Foxconn’s website labels the new plan “3+3 Transformation” and says it’s a combination of “Electric Vehicle,” “Digital Health,” and “Fii Robotics” with “5G Solutions,” “Semiconductors,” and “Industrial AI,” which, you see, is a list of three industries and another list of three technologies. (Fii, you will recall, is the company Foxconn created to oversee the Wisconsin project, which then created many levels of additional chaos.)
How will 3+3=∞ create jobs in Wisconsin? It remains to be seen!
What you can see, however, is Foxconn’s silly little dome, which was originally meant to be part of a cluster of buildings spelling out the word “Fii” from the sky; the dome was meant to dot one of the i’s. (Seriously.) That never happened, but the company’s Foxconn in Wisconsin website has also now been updated to note that the dome is “nearly 100 feet tall” and visible from Interstate 94. It also claims that the dome is a “High Performance Computing Data Center,” which, well, it is not.
(There are no public photos of the inside of the dome, but we have been told it is actually a conference center. There is a small shipping container outside the dome that has some servers in it, however. There is also a port-a-potty.)
Image: Nilay Patel
Gaze upon the majesty of Foxconn’s tiny dome in Wisconsin.
All of this is somehow related to Foxconn’s plan to build EVs for Tesla, which the company is no closer to doing today than it was when it dangled the same plan for Fisker in front of Wisconsin last year.
This has been your AI 8K+5G update. We are all 3+3 Transformers now. To infinity, and then hopefully somewhere else.