Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility in Fremont, California to train its Digit humanoid robots, planting itself up the highway from the plant where Tesla is expected to begin manufacturing Optimus this year. The move puts the two most visible names in humanoid robotics inside the same commute radius, and it lands as Agility says it has already booked $300 million in contract orders for a product that is generating revenue today.
Digit, a six-foot-tall bipedal robot, is currently moving totes and bins in warehouses and manufacturing lines for Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. Agility hasn't disclosed unit counts, but outside observers put the number of Digits in pilot or paid deployments in the dozens. At one GXO logistics facility alone, the company says Digits have moved 100,000 totes.
The Fremont proximity to Tesla is deliberate framing. Elon Musk has called Optimus "the biggest product ever" once it becomes "useful outside of Tesla sometime next year," but Agility CEO Peggy Johnson is drawing a line between roadmap and revenue.
Key facts
- 01Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot training facility in Fremont, California, near the plant where Tesla will build Optimus this year.
- 02The company has secured $300 million in contract orders, with dozens of Digit robots in pilot or revenue-generating deployments.
- 03Digits have moved 100,000 totes at a GXO logistics facility, with Amazon, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada also on the customer list.
- 04More than 30 additional customers are in talks about deploying Digit, and version 5 arrives this fall with human-sensing capability.
- 05CEO Peggy Johnson is steering a reverse-merger expected to make Agility the first pure-play humanoid robot company on public markets later this year.
Johnson also used the moment to underline Agility's operating advantage: it has already cleared the compliance work that keeps most robots in the lab. That work — safety certifications, IT integration, hooking into warehouse management systems — is what turns a demo into a purchase order, and it's the gap most of Agility's newer competitors haven't crossed yet.
The competitive field around Agility has thickened fast. Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, and Sunday Robotics have all raised on the premise that transformer-based neural networks will do for robotics what large language models did for text. Agility, founded in 2015 by researchers who developed the bipedal walking techniques underneath Digit, is taking a narrower view of where generative AI belongs in the stack.
Co-founder and chairman Damion Shelton frames the split in safety-critical terms.
Where AI does the heavy lifting at Agility is application development — the long tail of tasks that no reasonable engineering headcount could hand-code. Shelton credited board member Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor, with pressing the founders on how the company would scale application coding, a question generative models now answer by letting operators describe tasks rather than program them line by line.
The new facility is built to accelerate deployments against that pipeline. Johnson said more than 30 customers are in active conversations about bringing Digit in, and the Fremont site will let the robot learn new skills in environments that mirror the warehouses and factories it will actually work in. Digit version 5, expected to be unveiled this fall, will add the ability to sense humans and will no longer need to operate inside a robot-only zone — a prerequisite for most mixed-labor deployments.
Agility isn't chasing the in-home humanoid market that Figure and 1X have teased, a position most independent robotics researchers agree with given current safety limits. Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst laid out the industrial ladder instead.
Johnson is steering the company through a reverse-merger expected to close later this year, which would make Agility the first pure-play humanoid robot company on U.S. public markets. That timing matters: it puts audited financials, unit economics, and deployment data into public filings well before Tesla ships Optimus outside its own factories, and before Figure or 1X reach comparable commercial scale.
For the humanoid category, Agility's Fremont move reframes the near-term contest. Tesla's Optimus pitch rests on scale, vertical integration, and Musk's trillion-dollar rhetoric. Agility's rests on a shipping product, named customers, a public-markets listing, and $300 million in already-signed orders. Whichever thesis wins over the next 18 months will set the template for how the rest of the humanoid market gets financed — and both sides now sit close enough to watch each other's loading docks.
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