China Built a $1.2B Factory With No Lights, No Workers and No Breaks — It Runs 24 Hours

Inside China's $1.2 billion Midea smart factory in Shunde — a facility that runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in complete darkness. No workers on the floor. No lights. No shift changes. Just robots. In 2022, China installed 290,367 industrial robots — more than every other country combined. Foxconn replaced 60,000 workers with robots in a single factory. Xiaomi built an 81,000 sq meter facility that produces 10 million smartphones a year with zero human presence. And it's accelerating. Project Scale covers the engineering decisions, the money, and the infrastructure behind the world's biggest projects — the parts most coverage skips. Subscribe and drop a comment — what do you want us to cover next? ────────────────────────────── SOURCES & FURTHER READING ────────────────────────────── IFR World Robotics Report 2023 — ifr.org Made in China 2025 (CSIS English translation) — csis.org Midea-KUKA acquisition — Bloomberg, Reuters (2016) Xiaomi dark factory — VnExpress, Lei Jun statement (2024) Foxconn automation — IEN, Terry Gou statement (2021) American Society for Quality defect benchmarks — asq.org ────────────────────────────── #ChinaManufacturing #DarkFactory #LightsOutFactory #ChinaTechnology #MadeInChina2025 #Automation #Robotics #ChinaEngineering #ProjectScale #MegaProject #IndustrialRobots #FutureOfWork #Foxconn #Xiaomi #Manufacturing