Tate bet its 120-year welding craft on 58 cobots. The data-center backlog decided it.

The 120-year-old company behind the bones of U.S. data centers just rewrote its welding playbook. Tate, Inc., founded in Columbia, Maryland in 1904, makes the structural ceilings, containment systems, and airflow management that sit inside hyperscaler facilities. In 2024, with the AI buildout pulling project timelines and quality tolerances in opposite directions, Tate decided to stop hand-welding its most demanding assemblies. The replacement is a fleet of 58 collaborative robot welders from Hirebotics, deployed across three plants in Arkansas, Virginia, and Kentucky and managed from a phone or tablet through Hirebotics' cloud-based Beacon Pro platform.

Cobots are robots designed to share workspace with people rather than cage themselves off. Hirebotics' version pairs a six-axis arm with a no-code interface, so a welder can program a part by tapping through steps instead of writing code. Beacon Pro is the cloud control plane, letting a single programmer at Tate push the same weld recipe to all three plants and watch each arm's status live. The setup lets a 120-year-old metalwork supplier run 58 standardized welding cells without standing up a robotics department.

Hyperscaler buildout was squeezing Tate's data-center business the same way it is squeezing every supplier in the chain: bigger buildings, faster, no tolerance for rework on the structural welds that hold up racks, cable trays, and cold-aisle containment. Manual welding at that volume either adds headcount, which the U.S. industrial labor market will not give a 1904 shop in Columbia, Maryland, or it adds shift work, which hits a ceiling when a single bad weld can fail inspection. Tate ran a roughly nine-vendor bake-off before picking Hirebotics; the deciding factor, according to Hirebotics' own account, was a 30-minute parts-weld demo and a willingness to let Tate's welders touch the pendant themselves. (Hirebotics case study, The Robot Report)

The first two robots shipped in September 2023, the rollout reached 58 across three states, and Hirebotics published the Tate case study on August 6, 2026 (Manufacturing Tomorrow). The case study is where the headline number lives: Hirebotics reports per-welder throughput on critical structural assemblies is up roughly 12x since deployment, while the certified-welder team has grown rather than shrunk. That figure is vendor-published, repeated without independent measurement by the trade pickups, and should be read as Hirebotics' account rather than a benchmark. (Hirebotics case study)

Existing welders, by Hirebotics' account, learned to run the cobots in 10 to 20 minutes of training, with tutorial videos plus hands-on help. Jonathon Cook, a Tate cobot welding programmer, is quoted in the case study on being able to set amperage, heat, and travel speed directly from the pendant rather than dialing the welding power supply by hand. The welder stops being a torch operator and becomes a process controller for a cell, with software levers instead of wire feed. Both the training-time claim and the 12x figure originate with Hirebotics, and Tate has not, in the available material, given an independent operations read on either.

The available sources do not identify Tate's data-center customers, the share of Tate's revenue tied to hyperscaler buildout, the payback period on the cobot line, or how the certified-welder team has actually shifted in headcount since 2023. Until Tate or its parent Kingspan Group publishes an operations or labor statement, those are open questions. Hirebotics will exhibit at IMTS in Chicago September 14-19 at Booth 236341. (The Robot Report)