10 Fully Automated Factories Showing Where Manufacturing Is Heading
The factory of the future is already being built.
Across China, Japan, Europe and other industrial regions, manufacturers are combining robots, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, machine vision and digital twins to automate processes that once required hundreds or thousands of workers.
Some can even operate for extended periods without people on the production floor.
But there is a problem with the term fully automated factory.
It is frequently exaggerated.
A factory can contain thousands of robots and still require workers for maintenance, logistics, engineering or final assembly.
So rather than pretending all ten facilities below are completely workerless, this list includes both genuine lights-out operations and some of the world’s most advanced highly automated factories.
That difference tells us much more about where manufacturing is actually heading.
1. FANUC — Oshino, Japan
Perhaps the classic example of lights-out manufacturing comes from the company that builds many of the robots used to automate other factories.
At FANUC’s huge industrial campus near Mount Fuji, robots are extensively involved in producing CNC systems, industrial machinery and other robots.
FANUC says robotic machining cells at its Japanese factories can operate unmanned for long periods, including nights and weekends.
The robot factory at Oshino has capacity for thousands of units per month, with automated assembly, testing and inspection playing a major role.
It is the manufacturing equivalent of robots building their own successors.
2. Foxconn — Guanlan/Shenzhen, China
Foxconn is best known as one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers.
Less visible is the enormous effort it has made to automate those manufacturing operations.
At advanced facilities in Shenzhen, Foxconn has deployed lights-off production involving industrial robots, automated quality inspection, machine-learning systems and predictive maintenance.
The company’s manufacturing network has repeatedly received World Economic Forum Lighthouse recognition for its digital transformation.
The Shenzhen operations are especially important because they show lights-out manufacturing working in the demanding electronics industry.
3. Xiaomi Smartphone Factory — Beijing, China
Few recent factories have generated more attention than Xiaomi’s smartphone facility in Beijing’s Changping district.
The plant uses Xiaomi’s own intelligent manufacturing platform to coordinate production and is designed for an annual capacity measured in millions of smartphones.
Robots, machine vision and automated logistics manage a large portion of the process.
Xiaomi itself has previously demonstrated fully automated smartphone assembly lines capable of lights-out operation.
However, calling the entire new Beijing site a permanently unmanned “dark factory” would be misleading. Journalists visiting the plant in 2026 found an extremely advanced digital factory rather than the literally human-free building often depicted online.
In some ways, that makes Xiaomi an even better illustration of where manufacturing is going: extreme automation without necessarily eliminating humans entirely.
4. Foxconn — Bac Giang, Vietnam
Automation is not limited to China’s largest industrial regions.
Foxconn’s facility in Bac Giang became Vietnam’s first site recognized as a World Economic Forum Lighthouse factory.
AI, digitalization and advanced automation have been deployed to improve production efficiency while reducing environmental impact.
It demonstrates another important trend: the technologies developed inside highly automated Chinese factories are increasingly being replicated throughout global manufacturing networks.
5. Siemens Electronics Works — Amberg, Germany
Siemens’ Amberg Electronics Works is one of the most famous smart factories in Europe.
The plant manufactures SIMATIC industrial automation products — meaning it effectively uses automation technology to manufacture automation technology.
Approximately 75 percent of its value chain has been handled autonomously by machines and robots, according to Siemens.
The facility produces around 17 million products annually while managing roughly 1,200 variants and hundreds of production changeovers every day.
It is not a completely dark factory.
And that is precisely why it matters.
Amberg demonstrates how high automation and enormous product variety can coexist — one of the biggest challenges for future autonomous factories.
6. Philips — Drachten, Netherlands
Philips’ manufacturing and innovation facility in Drachten has long been associated with advanced automation.
The plant manufactures products including electric shavers and personal-care devices with extremely tight tolerances.
Philips has described the factory as one of Europe’s smartest, with hundreds of robots supporting production and data analytics helping predict machine failures.
The company’s engineers have explicitly described the long-term objective as a factory capable, figuratively speaking, of running in darkness.
The important lesson here is precision.
When components are measured in micrometers, automated production and inspection can outperform manual processes in consistency.
7. CATL — Ningde, China
Battery manufacturing is an ideal environment for automation.
Production volumes are enormous, tolerances are tight and quality failures can be extremely expensive.
CATL has applied AI-driven process control, automated optical inspection, edge computing and advanced analytics across its manufacturing operations.
At its Ningde site, World Economic Forum reporting has highlighted substantial increases in labour productivity and extremely low defect levels enabled by those technologies.
As electric vehicles and grid-scale batteries expand, battery plants could become some of the world’s most automated industrial environments.
8. Haier — Qingdao, China
Haier’s factories demonstrate that automation does not necessarily mean producing millions of identical objects.
At its advanced operations in Qingdao, the appliance giant has combined big data, digital twins, computer vision and robotics to improve both efficiency and customization.
One Haier refrigerator factory reported gains in production efficiency while using AI-powered process control and collaborative automation.
This is significant because customization has historically been one of automation’s weaknesses.
If automated factories can economically produce increasingly individualized products, one of the final advantages of conventional manufacturing begins to disappear.
9. Schneider Electric — Shanghai, China
Schneider Electric’s Shanghai operations provide another example of automation becoming increasingly intelligent rather than merely mechanical.
Facing greater product variety and growing demand, the facility increased automation while introducing machine-learning prototyping, intelligent planning and generative-AI-assisted maintenance.
According to the World Economic Forum, those changes contributed to major improvements in lead times and labour productivity.
Generative AI therefore has a role even in physical manufacturing: helping technicians diagnose equipment, understand documentation and resolve faults faster.
10. Siemens’ Next-Generation Amberg Factory — Germany
The next chapter is already being built.
In March 2026, Siemens announced an investment of more than €200 million in a new AI-based, digitalized and highly automated factory at its Amberg site.
The project is intended to expand production while improving flexibility and is expected to become another showcase for industrial AI and automation.
In other words, one of the world’s most advanced smart factories is already being supplemented by something even more sophisticated.
Why completely automated factories remain rare
These examples reveal something important.
The future is not arriving as a sudden switch from human factories to robot factories.
Manufacturing is being automated process by process.
Machining becomes autonomous.
Then logistics.
Then inspection.
Then scheduling.
Then maintenance.
Eventually the individual automated systems begin to communicate with each other.
At that point the factory stops behaving like a collection of machines and starts behaving more like one enormous machine.
True lights-out factories remain practical mainly in environments where production is repetitive, predictable and highly standardized.
But AI is gradually expanding the range of situations automation can handle.
The next industrial revolution is about autonomy
The first industrial revolution mechanized physical labour.
Mass production standardized it.
Computerization digitized it.
Industry 4.0 connected it.
The next stage may be autonomous manufacturing.
Factories will not simply execute instructions.
They will increasingly detect problems, modify production schedules, inspect their own output and optimize themselves.
The most interesting question is therefore no longer whether fully automated factories are possible.
They already are.
The real question is how many industries can economically adopt them — and how quickly.
