[Exclusive] "Largest Data Factory"... ROBOTIS to Build Bigger Than China’s Top Competitor

[The Upcoming K-Robot Era]
1,000-Strong Data Factory in Uzbekistan... "Action Data Hub"
Set to Surpass Data Factory of China's Top-Shipment Agibot
CEO Byungsoo Kim: "Advancing as a Data-Driven Robotics Platform Company"

Robot company ROBOTIS is set to operate a data factory in Uzbekistan, deploying a large-scale workforce of 1,000 people. Having entered the Uzbekistan market, ROBOTIS is building a new plant on a 110,000-square-meter (33,275-pyeong) site. If the company completes its data factory as planned, it is expected to surpass the data factory of Chinese company Agibot, the world's leading humanoid robot manufacturer by shipment volume.

According to the robotics industry on March 9, ROBOTIS established a subsidiary in Uzbekistan in January this year and will complete an ultra-large data factory for collecting robot motion data at the site in July. Full-scale operations are set to begin in October. Currently, at the early stage of building the data factory, approximately 100 personnel have been deployed. ROBOTIS plans to scale up its workforce in line with facility size, increasing the number of operational staff tenfold to 1,000 within the next two to three years.

To accumulate robot data, it is essential to conduct repetitive experiments, repeating the same actions for many hours. Uzbekistan's advantage lies in its low labor costs. Initially, in December of last year, the Uzbek government held a cooperation signing ceremony with ROBOTIS, led by the Deputy Prime Minister, and pledged to provide a site of approximately 66,000 square meters (about 20,000 pyeong) and offer various incentives and tax benefits. However, through recent collaboration between the two parties, the support site has been expanded to 33,275 pyeong, with a significant portion allocated for the data factory.

Byungsoo Kim, CEO of ROBOTIS

ROBOTIS is moving to operate this ultra-large data factory based on its expectation that robot companies with vast datasets will have a decisive advantage beyond hardware competitiveness in the future. The company is focusing on collecting and training data for robot applications in Uzbekistan. Until now, ROBOTIS has derived most of its revenue from actuators, which are core drive components in robots. However, going forward, it aims to transform into a robot platform company that integrates hardware and software technologies, leveraging its data competitiveness.

Byungsoo Kim, CEO of ROBOTIS, told The Asia Business Daily, "High-quality data is essential to improve robot proficiency," adding, "The core role of the data factory to be completed in Uzbekistan is to accumulate 'action data'." Kim emphasized, "We are actively expanding our data factory operations globally, following Korea and now Uzbekistan. Once the data factory is completed, its scale and functionality will surpass those of companies like China's Agibot, positioning us to challenge for the largest in the world." ROBOTIS aims to use the Uzbekistan data factory as an "Action Data Hub," enhancing not only its hardware but also its software competitiveness.

Founded in 1999, ROBOTIS is a specialized robotics company in which LG Electronics holds a 7.36% stake as of September last year.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.