FANUC America to invest $90M in U.S. robot manufacturing

FANUC America, the Japanese-owned robotics giant that makes the industrial arms running inside factories from Detroit to Shanghai, announced $90 million in new Michigan investment Tuesday. The money buys 840,000 square feet of production-ready space and 225 jobs. It does not buy a single word about Japan.

That silence is the story.

Mike Cicco, FANUC America's president and chief executive, said the new facility will strengthen domestic manufacturing, improve responsiveness to customer needs, and support industries that rely on automation to stay competitive. He called it a commitment to U.S. reindustrialization. The press release does not mention that FANUC Corporation, the parent company, is based in Japan, or that its robots shipped to the United States increasingly face import costs that did not exist two years ago.

The math on the facility is revealing on its own terms. Eight hundred forty thousand square feet sounds enormous until you divide by 225 workers: roughly 3,700 square feet per person. This is not a labor-intensive operation. The new facility is a bet on automation making automation — robots building the infrastructure other manufacturers will use to automate their own floors. The $90 million investment works out to about $400,000 per job, which is not a workforce program. It is a capital deployment.

The announcement lands in a specific moment for FANUC. In its FY2024 financial results, the company reported that robot sales dropped 16.4 percent to 242.4 billion yen, hit by weaker demand in China, Europe, and the Americas — particularly automotive, which drives roughly 40 percent of new robot installations in the United States. The company's annual earnings disclosure, filed in April 2025, cited U.S. tariffs as one of several uncertain factors preventing it from offering a forecast for the current fiscal year. That explicit acknowledgment — from the company itself, to investors — is the clearest available evidence that trade policy is a live variable in how FANUC thinks about its U.S. operations.

The competitive picture adds texture. According to Statista Market Insights, ABB and Epson each hold approximately 13 percent of the global industrial robotics market, making them the two largest manufacturers by that measure. The Big Four — FANUC, ABB, Yaskawa, and Kuka — collectively dominate the segment, and all four are currently building U.S. footprint on a similar timeline, drawn by the same combination of customer demand, labor market pressure, and policy incentives.

FANUC is not alone in this. Yaskawa Electric opened an 800,000-square-foot facility in Wisconsin. ABB announced a physical AI partnership with Nvidia. The pattern is not unique to FANUC — it is an industry-wide recalibration toward domestic U.S. manufacturing capacity. What is notable about FANUC specifically is that its CEO frames the investment as patriotic reindustrialization while the company's own filings flag tariff uncertainty as a material business risk. Both things can be true at the same time.

For builders and investors, the data point to watch is the jobs number. Two hundred twenty-five positions in an 840,000-square-foot facility means the growth in U.S. robot manufacturing is not, primarily, a workforce story. It is a supply chain story — a story about who controls the physical infrastructure of automation as U.S. industrial policy shifts the economics of where robots get made. The robots are still coming from Japan, in all likelihood. They just may get assembled closer to the factory doors that need them.

The new FANUC Academy, opening in Auburn Hills later this year, will train robotics and automation technicians — a separate workforce investment that FANUC is explicitly framing as addressing the national manufacturing skills gap. That is the human-side piece of this announcement, and it is happening outside the 225-job facility in a different building. The machines and the people who will work next to them are getting investment at different speeds, in different places, with different capital structures. The headline says 225 jobs. The real workforce story is in the academy.

FANUC America's new facility is expected to be operational by late 2027.