1X Technologies, the humanoid robotics company, has opened a 58,000-square-foot factory in Hayward, California. The company describes itself as the first vertically integrated humanoid robot manufacturing facility in the United States.
The facility has the capacity to produce 10,000 NEO robots in its first year, with consumer shipments planned before the end of 2026 and a target of 100,000 units by the end of 2027. The company says its entire first-year production capacity sold out within five days of preorders opening in October 2025.
1X was founded in 2014 by Norwegian roboticist Bernt Øivind Børnich, initially as Halodi Robotics, building safe actuators and full-body control systems for industrial and healthcare environments. The company rebranded as 1X in 2022 and pivoted to domestic robotics.
It raised $23.5 million in a 2023 Series A2 led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with Tiger Global and others participating, and has since raised a total of $100 million. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, with manufacturing in Hayward and additional operations in Moss, Norway.
NEO, the company’s consumer humanoid, is priced at $20,000 for early access with priority delivery in 2026, or $499 per month on a subscription. It is powered by Nvidia’s Jetson Thor onboard computing platform, trained using Nvidia’s Isaac simulation framework, and built around a soft, fabric-like exterior designed to make human interaction safer.
The Hayward factory is vertically integrated from the ground up: motors, batteries, structures, transmission systems, copper coils, and sensors are all manufactured in-house on production lines that the company says enable faster iteration cycles than those of competitors relying on Chinese suppliers for critical subsystems.
NEO units are already working inside the Hayward facility itself, handling logistics and stocking parts for human assembly technicians as part of what 1X calls its ‘robots building robots’ initiative. More than 200 people are currently employed at the site.
The competitive pressure is intense. Tesla is targeting Optimus production in the thousands for 2026, while Figure AI, Agility Robotics, and Apptronik are all advancing their own systems. Chinese manufacturers, such as Unitree, Agibot, and UBTECH, are already shipping at volume, backed by government subsidies that US and European competitors cannot match.
1X’s answer to the Chinese production advantage is domestic vertical integration: manufacturing everything in the US, iterating faster based on real-world feedback, and avoiding the supply-chain exposure that comes with offshore component dependence.
Looking ahead, 1X is targeting 100,000 units by 2027, alongside plans for a larger manufacturing site in San Carlos. The company is also developing a next-generation humanoid with improved optics and other upgrades, while exploring the long-term possibility of robots contributing to their own production.
