Key points
- New team sits inside Samsung's chip division
- Robots would take over work engineers do now
- Separate from Samsung's humanoid robot push
Samsung has formed a team to develop robots for its chip factories. The group sits inside Samsung's semiconductor business and is starting with equipment maintenance, work now handled by outside contractors and in-house engineers. Samsung is working toward factories that rely on fewer people for those routine tasks.
The team is called AX/PI, short for AI transformation and process innovation, and it started on September 1. It reports up through the Global Manufacturing and Infra Technology unit of Samsung's Device Solutions division, the part of the company that makes memory chips and runs its foundry. JoongAng Ilbo (중앙일보) first reported the setup on September 18.
The first robots will take on preventive maintenance, the routine servicing that keeps fab equipment running. Right now that job falls to suppliers and on-site engineers, who install, secure and clean the consumable parts on each machine. Those are the tasks Samsung wants to hand to robots first.
The work is still at an early stage. The team is mapping the paths a robot would travel, marking off work zones and setting the specifications for parts boxes, while it gathers data on how each task is done. One reason it's slow is that maintenance is done differently from machine to machine, so Samsung has to standardize the methods before a robot can follow a single routine.
Many of the people on the team are researchers with master's and doctoral degrees who used to work at Samsung's Equipment Technology Research Institute, a group that focused on localizing equipment and parts and was cut back in 2024. Samsung brought them together late last year as a task force, then made the team permanent this month.
Why a factory is easier to automate than the real world
Samsung has said it wants to turn its plants in Korea and abroad into AI-run, self-operating factories by 2030, and the robot team is one piece of that plan. A chip fab is an easier place for a robot than the open world. The routes, the machines and the surroundings are all fixed, so a robot built for one line can repeat the same moves without surprises. Purpose-built fab robots have the edge there over the general-purpose humanoids, which have to cope with messy, changing spaces.
Not the humanoid robots Samsung keeps showing off
The humanoid robot business Samsung set up earlier in the year is a separate effort. That group, the Robotics eXperience office, reports to Roh Tae-moon (노태문), who runs Samsung's consumer electronics division, and it works on general-purpose humanoid robots that Samsung hopes to sell. Samsung has also moved to bring Rainbow Robotics, a Korean robot maker, under its control and folded it into that push.
The fab team has a narrower goal, robots designed for repeatable work inside semiconductor plants. Korea's other big name in robots, Hyundai (현대차), has been spending heavily on the humanoid dream through Boston Dynamics and is still losing money on it.
For now the team isn't putting any robots on the line. It's gathering the data and writing the rules that would let one work, which is the slow, unglamorous first step toward a factory that runs itself.
