Agility Robotics Opens Fremont Training Site Near Tesla’s Planned Optimus Factory

The 60,000-square-foot facility gives Digit a larger base in a major manufacturing and logistics market as humanoid-robot makers compete to move from pilots to repeatable industrial deployments.

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility in Fremont, California, to train its Digit humanoid robots near the site where Tesla is expected to begin manufacturing Optimus robots this year.

The move places Agility in Tesla’s backyard while both companies pursue a much larger industrial market for humanoid robots. Tesla has not confirmed a manufacturing start date for Optimus in the available information, and Agility has not disclosed when its Fremont training facility will open.

For Agility, Fremont is less about a headline rivalry than about expanding the physical capacity needed to train, validate, and commercialize robots for factory and warehouse work. Digit is already being used to carry totes and bins in manufacturing and logistics environments for customers including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, the company said.

Agility said it has secured $300 million in contract orders for its robots. It has not disclosed how many Digit units it has built or deployed. Outside estimates have put deployments in the dozens across pilots and revenue-generating operations.

The company has provided one useful throughput marker from GXO: Digits moved 100,000 totes at a logistics facility. Agility has not published the time required to complete that work, the number of robots involved, the number of operating shifts, or the tote-handling cycle time. Those details matter for operators assessing whether a humanoid fleet can replace a constrained manual task, absorb volume peaks, or simply reduce the amount of walking and repetitive carrying assigned to warehouse staff.

Agility Chief Executive Peggy Johnson said the company’s commercial deployments have required it to meet facility safety, regulatory, and compliance requirements while connecting to customer IT and warehouse-management systems.

That is the operational distinction between a robot demonstration and a deployment. A Digit system must fit material flows, tote dimensions, staging rules, charging and maintenance plans, pedestrian traffic, and warehouse-management workflows. It can augment warehouse associates by taking repetitive tote transport, but it does not remove the need for supervisors, maintenance personnel, safety teams, and operations engineers to manage exceptions and uptime.

Tesla’s Optimus effort brings a better-capitalized competitor into the same regional robotics ecosystem. Elon Musk has said he expects Optimus to become useful outside Tesla sometime next year, describing the product as potentially Tesla’s largest. That timeline remains an expectation, not a confirmed external customer deployment schedule.

Agility, founded in 2015, is pursuing a more established commercialization path. Its Digit robot has been positioned around bounded industrial tasks rather than broad claims of general-purpose labor. Agility co-founder and chairman Damion Shelton has said safety-critical robot functions should not be placed under generative AI control, while arguing that generative AI can help address the challenge of creating applications for many different robot tasks.

The Fremont facility could help Agility train and prepare additional systems as its customer pipeline grows. But the company has not said how many robots the site will support, what training workloads it will handle, or whether it will include production capacity.

For plant and logistics operators, the immediate signal is that humanoid suppliers are building infrastructure around commercialization, not just prototype development. The investment case will still turn on measurable performance: tote moves per hour, operating uptime, labor coverage per shift, integration cost, safety performance, and the payback period against conventional automation or manual material handling.