1X Opens America's First Vertically Integrated Humanoid Factory: 10,000 NEO Units in Year One
1X Technologies opened its NEO Factory in Hayward, California on April 30 — a 58,000-square-foot facility the company calls the first vertically integrated humanoid robot factory in the United States. The site is sized to produce 10,000 NEO humanoid robots in its first year of operation. A second facility in San Carlos, expected online later this year, is designed to push combined annual capacity beyond 100,000 units by the end of 2027.
First consumer shipments from Hayward are planned for 2026.
Why Vertical Integration
1X builds almost everything in-house, down to the copper coil windings in the motors. CEO Bernt Børnich has been direct about why: “Most people think humanoids are a robotics problem. They’re wrong. It’s a manufacturing problem.”
The argument is that supply chain dependency — buying actuators, sensors, and frames from third parties — is the fastest route to production bottlenecks and cost ceilings. Vertical integration is expensive to establish but creates the kind of cost curve and quality control that allows for rapid price-down as volume scales. Tesla used the same logic building its own battery cells and drive units.
The NEO
NEO is a full-body humanoid robot designed for home use, with an emphasis on household chores and daily assistance. The form factor is humanoid for practical reasons: homes are built for humans, so a humanoid robot requires less physical modification to the environment than purpose-built alternatives.
1X took 10,000 pre-orders in five days in October 2025, which validated production investment and anchored the Hayward buildout timeline. Pricing for consumer units has not been publicly confirmed, but the production scale target implies a unit economics goal far below current enterprise humanoid pricing.
Backing and Competition
1X is Norwegian-founded and OpenAI-backed. The OpenAI connection gives it preferential access to model infrastructure, though 1X has published its own end-to-end neural policies for robot control distinct from OpenAI’s internal robotics research.
The factory opening comes the same week Meta acquired Assured Robot Intelligence to build the intelligence layer for third-party humanoid hardware. The two announcements together sketch the emerging structure of the humanoid market: platform AI providers (Meta, Google, potentially OpenAI) competing to supply the intelligence layer, while hardware manufacturers (1X, Figure, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics) race to achieve manufacturing scale first.
10,000 units in year one would make 1X the highest-volume consumer humanoid producer in the United States — a bar that currently sits near zero.