April 2026 — Milence’s own timeline now reads “begins operations with the opening of its first charging hub in Venlo, the Netherlands, April 2026”, closing the loop on the alliance’s founding site and taking the operational network past 30 hubs in eight countries. A further 16 hubs are in development, with 90 expected operational by end-2028.

Why the count matters more than the ceremony. Truck-charging networks cross a behavioural threshold when fleets stop asking “is there a hub?” and start asking “which hub?” — the same network-mesh effect visible in China’s Jingjinji swap cluster (121 stations, covered in our case study). At 30+ hubs with MCS live at Antwerp, Zwolle and Landvetter, the TEN-T corridors through the Benelux and into Germany are approaching that threshold for regional and medium-haul duty; long-haul remains a per-corridor readiness question, which our AFIR/MCS explainer and corridor tracking exist to answer.

The money behind the build. The network’s credibility rests on €500 million of founder equity plus a €120 million financing facility signed in May with infrastructure lenders (Edmond de Rothschild’s BRIDGE platform, Íslandsbanki, Invest-NL among them, with InvestEU support) — the alliance’s first access to broader capital markets. McKinsey-sized context: Europe needs roughly €7 billion of truck-charging investment by 2030 and €40 billion by 2040; Milence’s ~€294,000 implied cost per charging point is the current benchmark for what corridor infrastructure actually costs. Fleets waiting for “the infrastructure to be ready” should read the build rate, not the headlines: 30 hubs and roughly 1,800 truck-suitable public points in Europe today, 90 hubs by 2028 — the map fills in on a three-year view, not a three-month one.