NEO Factory | Building Your NEO

Six months ago, we launched the preorder campaign for NEO The Home Robot.

The response was overwhelming.

NEO became one of the most talked about products on earth and shattered records for product launches. But most importantly, it created a community of early customers that trust us to deliver the world's first home robot to their doorstep.

It wasn’t just overwhelming, it was (and still is) deeply emotional for us. Some of the team here at 1X have been working on this dream for more than ten years with nothing but passion and deep conviction that the world needs helpful robots and that other people would love NEO as much as we do. After spending years being called crazy, it can be easy to doubt your conviction.

But on October 28th, we launched NEO to the world and booked out our entire production capacity for the next year in just 5 days (10,000 NEOs). With that, our mission became clearer than ever, and we’ve had our heads down for the last few months taking the right steps to deliver on our promise.

With that said, the biggest question we get to date is: “Where is my NEO?”

Our team has been doing their best to answer all of your emails and inquiries on X, but we figured it would be best to just answer directly.

First, it’s important to set a bit of context around the preorder and its position in the broader plan to bring NEO to homes everywhere.

We launched the preorder because:

1. 1.We’re Excited About the Product: We have a product we are really excited about that we wanted to share with the world (and it’s already better than marketed. Breakthroughs like NEO’s World Model and more to come will unlock even more exciting AI functionality than previously anticipated).
2. 2.It’s Crucial to Planning: We needed to figure out who wants a NEO, where they are in the world and how many people want a NEO to inform production planning and market entry plans.
3. 3.We Want to Connect With Early Adopters: Since launching, we’ve been able to connect with dozens of early customers and learn about their needs– helping us hone in the feature-set we’re delivering.

So back to the question of “Where is my NEO”

In short, it’s coming. Some of you will get your NEO this year, some will get them later. We promised the first NEOs would ship in 2026, and we’re keeping that promise. We are working around the clock to get it to you, but want to make sure that what we ship does justice to the humanoid space (this product has been built on the shoulders of giants) and the trust you’ve placed in us.

There is a lot that goes into creating the first ever humanoid consumer product experience and we aren’t hiding from it. You have to take everything you’ve built, test it aggressively, iterate on it endlessly, and package it up to ship to customers that paid good money for a life-changing experience. There is a lot of trust in that exchange and we don’t take that lightly. The road ahead includes everything from scaling up manufacturing, expanding our internal home testing program (more 1X employees need NEOs!), and continuing to iterate on the product experience until it’s ready for the general audience. Starting today– we are going to be giving you more frequent updates on all fronts.

With that said, we have been making tremendous progress towards our milestones and today I couldn’t be more excited to take you inside our NEO Factory right here in Hayward, California, where we are producing more NEO’s than ever.

- Bernt Børnich

NEO Factory | Hayward, California

At 1X, we don’t just order parts from suppliers, assemble them, and call that manufacturing.

The NEO Factory in Hayward, California is America’s first vertically integrated high-volume humanoid robot factory. Spanning 58,000 sq ft and already employing 200+ team members, the NEO Factory has commenced full-scale production of NEO.

We design and manufacture NEO’s critical components in-house — including motors, batteries, structures, transmission systems, soft goods, sensors and more. From cutting metal parts to fully automated motor manufacturing lines that form copper coils, we maintain maximum control of our supply chain. This approach sets us apart from competitors that rely on foreign suppliers for critical subsystems–enabling not only faster iteration, but higher safety standards, efficient scaling, and resilience to geopolitical events that can impact supply chains.

With the NEO Factory in Hayward now online and our San Carlos facility coming online later this year, 1X has the capacity to produce up to 10,000 NEOs per year, with planned increases in automation expected to scale production toward 100,000+ units annually by the end of 2027.

Building The Factory

Scaling NEO production was always part of the plan. But after the response to our preorder, we had to accelerate everything. With speed in our DNA, we stood up the NEO Factory in Hayward, California in just three months.

In the short time since receiving our final permits in January, we’ve hired more than 200 employees and have become fully operational.

Most people think humanoids are a robotics problem. They’re wrong. It’s a manufacturing problem. Production makes prototypes look easy.

So we built the machine that builds the machines:

• Manufacturing Lines, Automations and Processes to create parts from scratch for New Product Introduction and mass manufacturing.
• 1X Factory OS at the core of all factory operations–built in-house to streamline NEO production. Instead of relying on fragmented tooling, it brings every stage of production into a single system that operates in real time.
• Testing & Validation ensures quality at every station.
• Reliability Lab designed to break things fast and surface failures–. 20M+ cycles and counting.
• New Product Introduction lines to produce and test new builds in limited quantities before being introduced on the main line.
• Joint & Limb Assembly is where we assemble NEO’s joints and body parts for mass production.
• Final Integration is where robots are fully assembled and stand for the first time before putting on covers and suits.
• Warehousing is where semi-trucks pull up to the warehouse doors to drop off parts and materials.
• Machine Park to craft NEO parts from raw materials.
• Training center for onboarding new employees.
• Craftsmanship Check to ensure quality fit and finish.
• Metrology to verify part dimensions.

From Raw Materials to Robots

Manufacturing

Nearly every component of NEO is designed and built from scratch at 1X using manufacturing processes and automations that we’ve been developing since founding the company in 2014.

Even for the parts we don’t produce in-house at the NEO Factory, we work directly inside our suppliers’ facilities to design, develop, and enforce our own quality standards. This level of true vertical integration allows us to deliver the lowest-cost hardware, iterate at an industry-leading pace, and protect our supply chain from geopolitical risks.

Today, we’re excited to take you inside the process, from raw materials to finished robots walking off the line.

1X Motors (Revo2)

Since the start of production in Hayward, our team has manufactured 17,000 motors.

We’ve been perfecting the Revo2 motor– the heart of NEO’s tendon-driven actuation system– since 2015, beginning in Moss, Norway. Producing motors in-house allows us to push the physical limits of torque-to-weight density.

Our motor manufacturing starts with a spool of copper and ends with a fully assembled tendon-driven actuator. Every step is automated by machines designed and built by 1X engineers– from winding our own copper coils to fabricating stators from electric steel. The result is the world’s highest-performance, lowest cost electric motor for humanoid robotics.

1X Motor Electronics

Our state-of-the-art motor electronics remove the traditional constraints of motor design, allowing us to design net new motors with dramatically higher torque density.

By controlling every layer– from electric steel selection to manufacturing methods, software, and custom electronics– we can extract maximum performance from the Revo2 motors. This level of vertical integration, engineered from first principles, is what enables us to co-develop components that work together at a level simply not possible when relying on off-the-shelf parts.

NEO’s Tendons

NEO’s tendons are the result of more than a decade of innovation in materials science and advanced manufacturing processes. They are engineered to handle heavy payloads while delivering safe, energy-efficient, and remarkably quiet movement– all with industry-leading durability and silent operation.

Every tendon is produced using our proprietary process, which begins with careful material selection, followed by precision braiding and specialized post-processing. This ensures each tendon is perfectly prepared for integration into NEO’s Tendon Drive assembly.

Hand Manufacturing Line

We manufacture NEO’s 22 DoF hand (more on those soon) on our dedicated production line.

Every hand begins with material selection for tendons and rigorous in-house testing. From there, we assemble the full tendon system, integrate our custom electronics, and install the 1X Motors to drive each degree of freedom.

The structural components– fingers, palms, wrists, and forearms– are manufactured directly on the line. Finally, we mold the soft “flesh” and outer gloves using our proprietary polymers, seamlessly integrating an advanced tactile sensing stack throughout.

This end-to-end in-house process gives us complete control over quality, performance, and iteration speed for one of the most important and complex parts of NEO.

1X Battery Packs

TThe 1X Battery Pack is manufactured with aerospace-grade cells, allowing us to achieve performance and safety levels that are simply not possible with off-the-shelf batteries.

Our proprietary Battery Management System (BMS) samples at 100 Hz, which is roughly 100 times faster than typical commercial packs. This enables real-time monitoring of battery state of health and highly accurate predictions of future performance, state of charge, and state of function. The result is a safer, longer-lasting battery with exceptional fast-charging capability.

We designed the entire battery manufacturing line for high-volume automation using low-cost, highly reliable components. It can complete a weld every 500 milliseconds, giving us the capacity to produce 10,000 batteries per year. A key innovation to 1X Battery Pack production includes innovative side-cooling on both the top and bottom of the battery pack. This approach delivers superior thermal management while supporting rapid, scalable production.

The outcome is a battery that combines industry-leading safety, reliability, fast-charging, and longevity at the lowest possible cost.

NEO Cortex powered by NVIDIA Jetson Thor

Every NEO rolling off the production line comes equipped with the latest NVIDIA Jetson Thor embedded in the NEO Cortex. This integration enables powerful real-time AI inference directly on the robot for safety-critical functions, perception, reasoning, and decision-making—without heavy cloud computing.

NEO Cortex, AKA NEO’s brain, tightly integrates on-board compute with custom sensors including dual 8.85MP 90Hz stereo fisheye cameras, beam-forming microphones for directional audio, IMUs and more. Each component is mounted on a custom racking engineered and built in-house, paired with a thermal management system that keeps powerful hardware running efficiently and whisper-quiet.

New Product Introduction (NPI)

The first NEO took 1 year to go from CAD to walking its first steps. The latest version, produced in our Hayward Facility, went from CAD to walking in just 1 month.

This acceleration is powered by our NPI line co-located near the Machine Park, where hardware design and manufacturing engineers can go from CAD release to physical parts in as little as a few hours. These rapid prototypes allow us to test new designs, identify issues, and implement solutions at an unprecedented pace– all before new designs are released to mass production.

Assembly

Smart Assembly

At the NEO Factory in Hayward, California, we designed the assembly line around continuous flow rather than traditional departments. The entire system eliminates dead zones and queues, favoring single-piece flow wherever possible and batching only where physics demands it.

Each station receives pre-kitted modules, removing the need for searching and guesswork. Functionality is added through progressive bring-up, with in-line verification at every critical step. This ensures issues are caught and resolved immediately, rather than at the end of line.

The line is further strengthened by intelligent tooling that enforces correctness by design: if the part fits, it’s right. Cycle times are tightly balanced across stations to prevent hidden bottlenecks, while proprietary tendon joint conditioning eliminates early-life failures before final integration. Every build is fully digitally traceable down to the individual component and torque value.

The result is a tightly controlled process where quality and throughput scale together.

Automating Assembly

As we scale robot production, automation is critical to delivering both the volume and uncompromising quality our targets demand. We prioritize highly repeatable processes with minimal variation— tasks where consistency, reliability, or cycle time matter most. Whether that means holding micron-level tolerances or executing uniform process steps at scale, automation eliminates human-induced error and ensures every unit meets the same standard.

Over the past decade, we’ve developed proprietary assembly automations that now handle critical steps across the build —from precise stator insertion into the housing to controlled soldering. Each system is engineered specifically for its task, optimizing alignment, force application, thermal conditions, or motion profiles as needed. Looking ahead, our production lines will integrate a hybrid approach: proven industrial automation for speed and repeatability, combined with humanoid robots for greater flexibility. This combination will let us scale output, adapt quickly to design changes, and continuously improve efficiency, consistency, and overall factory throughput.

Robots Building Robots

Today, our robots have already started to help around the factory. They are actively collecting real-world data and using the 1X World Model to learn practical tasks– from stocking parts for our assembly technicians to performing basic warehousing and logistics operations.

In the coming months, they will take on broader roles such as facility security and other longer-horizon tasks where reliable, helpful hands are needed most.

Long term, the possibilities are near limitless. We are incredibly excited to share regular updates as NEO evolves from factory assistant to a true general-purpose robot– one that will eventually handle everything from household chores to building robots, supporting chip fabs, powering data centers, and more.

In Conclusion

The NEO Factory in Hayward, California is live and fully operational. The facility is staffed by a team of over 200 employees and is currently ramping toward an initial production capacity of 10,000 NEOs annually. With automation updates already underway and the new San Carlos factory coming online, we are on track to reach 100,000 units per year by the end of 2027. While the current NEOs coming off the line are being prioritized for our internal team to accelerate development and testing in homes, we are working around the clock to deliver NEO to your doorstep starting in 2026.

Home humanoids are a generational technology... As NEO’s AI capabilities continue to improve, as manufacturing scales, and as we deliver more NEO’s, we will unlock a new era of abundance. We’re not just building a new product, we’re laying the foundation for a fundamentally better future.

We truly can’t wait to get you your NEO. Thank you for being a part of this journey.