1X Moves HQ to Silicon Valley

The move to Palo Alto shows that 1X sees the bottleneck in humanoid robotics as talent, data systems, and capital access more than factory floor capacity. 1X kept manufacturing in Norway, but shifted its center of gravity to the Bay Area as it moved from building robots to scaling AI, teleoperation, and deployment teams. That matches a market where the winners are likely to be the companies that recruit top embodied AI talent fastest and turn field data into better robot behavior.

• 1X said its new Palo Alto headquarters is an 80,000 square foot site for up to 400 people, built to consolidate teams and work more closely with partners and investors. The company framed the move explicitly around being in the global center of AI and robotics.
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• The company is hiring Palo Alto based roles across AI research, robot operations, service, and fleet infrastructure. That is a concrete sign the headquarters shift is tied to scaling the software and deployment organization around NEO, not just moving executive offices.
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• This also places 1X closer to the core competitive arena. In humanoids, the key race is collecting real world training data and improving models through teleoperation and deployment, while peers like Figure, Apptronik, and Tesla compete for the same Silicon Valley talent pool and investors.
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Going forward, the split structure is likely to define 1X's model, with AI, recruiting, fundraising, and customer expansion anchored in Palo Alto, and manufacturing remaining in Norway. If that works, 1X can stay capital efficient on production while competing at Silicon Valley speed on the parts of humanoid robotics that compound fastest, talent, data, and model quality.