On a Thursday afternoon, about 70 people gathered outside an unassuming office building in Fremont, where Agility Robotics unveiled its new engineering hub for Digit, the humanoid bipedal robot. The headline number is the point: the facility is a 60,000-square-foot space built to support nearly 200 existing and new employees working on AI and skills for Digit.

Jonathan Hurst, Agility’s cofounder and chief robot officer, framed the purpose with unusual clarity: “This is going to be the robot school.” Fremont, he implied, is where robot skills get taught, iterated, and improved beyond a carefully staged demo.

That’s the subtext behind why Fremont matters right now. For decades, Silicon Valley’s glamour has been packed around research labs and venture capital. But robotics is different. It does not just need algorithms. It needs large buildings, hands-on production expertise, and enough open floor space for machines to move around. Fremont is betting it can provide those physical requirements at a scale that many other places struggle to match.

Agility is not the first robotics-heavy company to plant roots in Fremont. Over the past 15 years, companies tied to robotics or autonomous vehicles have set up shop there, including Tesla, Meta, Zoox, Pony.ai, and DoorDash. The city’s own industrial history is doing real work here. For more than 25 years, Fremont was home to New United Motor Manufacturing, or NUMMI, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. When the plant shut down in 2010, other cities might have reimagined it for housing or office space. Fremont, Mayor Raj Salwan said, “doubled down on industrial,” preserving industrial land and positioning itself as “all in on manufacturing.”

That decision shows up in who came next. Tesla acquired the NUMMI plant in 2010, keeping Fremont’s automotive identity intact while attracting a supplier ecosystem. Salwan also said the city courted other industries, including semiconductor, biotech, and advanced manufacturing. The payoff is that robotics companies can reuse and adapt infrastructure built for hardware. Tesla’s Fremont factory, for instance, is being converted into a production hub for Optimus, the company’s humanoid robot.

But space alone does not cut it in robotics. Execution speed matters, and that’s where Fremont’s regulatory approach enters the story. According to Salwan, the city streamlined regulations, developed in-house expertise, and changed zoning rules so qualifying projects can move forward without lengthy hearings. “We tell you everything up front, and then we help fast-track the process,” he said. For robotics founders and boards, this is not just civic branding. When you are building machines that require frequent testing and iteration, time-to-occupy matters as much as time-to-deploy.

Fremont also benefits from its geographic compromise with the rest of the Bay Area talent machine. The city is roughly 15 miles east of Palo Alto, across the Dumbarton Bridge. That proximity keeps companies near the engineering and investor network that clusters near Stanford University and Sand Hill Road, even if Fremont itself is not the epicenter. DoorDash, headquartered in San Francisco, designs and builds its delivery bot Dot in Fremont through a partnership with Sonic Manufacturing. Sonic has a 120,000-square-foot campus supporting Dot’s production, and DoorDash’s spokesperson said the collaboration lets engineering teams work “shoulder-to-shoulder,” compressing timelines from “months or even years” to “a matter of weeks.” The mechanics of robotics progress are increasingly tied to exactly this kind of physical collaboration.

Even smaller robotics operators are structured around the same principle: keep development and testing under one roof to iterate fast. Anyware Robotics, founded in 2023 and building mobile warehouse robots, runs its entire operation inside an 11,000-square-foot Fremont facility, with software development and robot testing happening in the same building. And Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi venture, has manufacturing operations in Fremont and Hayward: Fremont retrofits test vehicles and configures sensor pods, while Hayward assembles the purpose-built robotaxi. Zoox said the sites are close enough to its headquarters in Foster City to allow daily collaboration between engineering and manufacturing teams, and it is hiring for roles supporting both locations.

Meta’s footprint reinforces the pattern. In 2022, Meta expanded operations near its Menlo Park headquarters with a Fremont campus. Today, the campus focuses heavily on hardware research and development, particularly robotics and virtual- and augmented-reality devices. In other words, it is not only humanoids. It is the broader category of “physical AI” where prototypes turn into systems that must work in messy, real environments.

The strategic point, however, is not that Fremont is replacing San Francisco or the Peninsula as startup and venture capital centers. The source is explicit that Fremont’s role is different. It is “more physical,” enabling companies to expand robotics ambitions and place engineers nearer the factory floor. Tesla’s Optimus production plans, Agility’s continued manufacturing of Digit in Salem while expanding its engineering pool in the Bay Area, and Agility’s decision to host customers and investors passing through Silicon Valley all add up to the same conclusion: robotics capital is starting to demand proof you can see, not just videos you can share.

Hurst’s last quote lands hard for anyone used to demo-day theatrics. As the robotics race heats up, investors want robots that work beyond a highlight reel. Having Digit in Fremont makes it easier for customers and investors already traveling through the Bay Area to see the robot in action, and it avoids the need for a trip to Agility’s Salem HQ. In a world where boards are increasingly asking “when does this scale,” Fremont is positioning itself as a place where scaling begins with buildings, floor space, and the ability to iterate fast.