# Humanoid production has fewer parts but more deployment variance

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/humanoid-production-has-fewer-parts-but-more-deployment/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Bernt Børnich](https://realalpha.app/builders/bernt-bornich/) · Bernt Børnich is founder and CEO of 1X.
- Host: [Ti Morse](https://realalpha.app/people/ti-morse/) · Host, Relentless · Interviews hard-tech founders on Relentless; guests include Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong and Hadrian's Chris Power.
- Show: Relentless
- Episode: [Manufacturing 50,000 Humanoid Robots Next Year | Bernt Børnich, 1X](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/), Sep 18, 2026
- Moment: 0:00 to 3:53 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/humanoid-production-has-fewer-parts-but-more-deployment/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=0

## Quote

> “A well-designed humanoid robot is probably **about 1,000 parts**.”
> — [Bernt Børnich](https://realalpha.app/builders/bernt-bornich/) at [2:36](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=156) · Relentless

## Takeaways

1. Hayward is built for 10,000 units at full capacity.
2. The San Carlos factory is planned for 100,000 units annually.
3. A measured ramp helps catch reliability problems before they scale.

## About this segment

Bernt Børnich describes factories targeting 110,000 units of annual capacity and a gradual ramp through quality gates. He says robots have fewer parts than cars but face far more varied environments.

From “Manufacturing 50,000 Humanoid Robots Next Year | Bernt Børnich, 1X”, Sep 18, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=0) Today, I am sitting down with Bernd Barnick, the founder and CEO of OneX. You want to ship 50,000 humanoid robots next year. So can we start off with you just walking me through how do you actually go from just R&D to actually shipping that number of robots in 12 months? Yeah, so the factory we're in now in Hayward is built out to a capacity fully ramped about 10,000 units. So that's really been like the goal of this year.

[0:25](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=25) We're not going to do 10,000 because we're going to be pretty much towards the end of the year when the line is fully ramped um but uh in parallel we're building out san carlos so to make this happen we have to do some parallel building uh and that's going to be 100 000 units at full capacity per year so 110k per year but um of course most of that volume is going to come online pretty late next year the real gating item here is really kind of like not just shipping 50 000 units but ensuring that you don't get them back right so uh we we have to kind of scale our volume at a rational rate prototypes are easy like it's a cliche but it's true prototypes are easy production is really hard we've churned through a lot of issues here to kind of get to where we're confident in ramping volume but whenever you take like the next big step on the volume you always

[1:12](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=72) find things that you don't find on the previous one so like it's just statistics right when you do a hundred units you don't find the same things that you find when you do a thousand or ten thousand because things that are rare just gets statistically significant and like your yield really needs to come up so um we hope to find a good balance where we take the time to really iterate on the product and like get the lessons learned and get that back into the fleet and then go into larger and larger volumes as we kind of cross these gates uh quality gates but um the goal is 50 000 so it's gonna be a lot of work i was thinking about like cars when you were talking and with a car if you're testing some car just yourself you're going to experience most of what it is to own a car just driving around whereas with like a humanoid robot the number of you know

[2:00](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=120) random super unusual behaviors that someone might have this robot in is like multiple orders of magnitude more than a car and so going from like zero to 50,000 cars is incredibly difficult going to 50,000 robots is like I think probably like one or two orders of magnitude more difficult How do you kind of plan for that? Yes, I think there's pros and cons, right? So a humanoid robot is a lot of parts.

[2:25](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=145) It's quite complicated, but it is not the same number of parts as a car. And I see a lot of companies kind of compare humanoid robots to cars. And I think if you do that, you should kind of like take a step back and think about what you've made. Because a car is like 50,000 parts. A well-designed humanoid robot is probably about 1,000 parts. and a car is like 4 000 pounds a well-designed human or robot is hopefully less than 70 if it's going to be safe uh so it is actually a simpler system in that sense although like the individual complexity and the number of moving parts is larger uh so you get some on that side uh but you're of course entirely correct also that like uh it's a way less constrained environment that you're deploying into so you're going to see a lot of a lot more weird shit that's just the way it's

[3:08](https://realalpha.app/v/DXSs6yIL00w/?t=188) going to be um i think a lot of it comes down to expectation management like it's going to be bumpy it's it's not going to be perfect uh i really hope we can provide a very good customer service and ensure that whatever happens we're treating you well and we really figure this out iterate on this and make sure that you don't have to face the same problem repeatedly but of course We also need to deploy into some quite structured, more like less variance type environments for parts of the volume and not have 50,000 robots into 50,000 different tasks.