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Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard

TechCrunch AI Tim Fernholz 17 July 2026, 20:19

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility in Fremont, California to train its Digit humanoid robots near Tesla's Optimus manufacturing site. The company has secured $300 million in contract orders and has deployed its robots in real warehouse and manufacturing settings for customers including Amazon, GXO, and Toyota. Agility's facility will enable faster deployment of robots to over 30 prospective customers while the company prepares for a public listing later this year.

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Agility is opening a new training center for its Digit robots in Fremont, California.

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TLDRocket 21 July 2026

The open-weight AI model market hit an inflection point today as Alibaba and Kimi released trillion-parameter competitors that challenge the closed-model orthodoxy—just as Washington moved to restrict them. Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 Max (2.4 trillion parameters) and Kimi K3 (2.8T) are going open-weight, with K3 ranking first on Frontend Web App Arena and fourth on agentic benchmarks, signaling that scale and transparency can coexist. The timing matters: while U.S. policymakers weigh layered restrictions on Chinese open models, technical experts are pushing back hard, arguing that closed gardens actually hurt security and competition more than they help. The real fragmentation risk isn't technical—it's regulatory.

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Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard

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