CircuitHub has revealed that The Grid, its factory-scale robot in Massachusetts capable of assembling hundreds of circuit boards on-demand every day, has closed the price gap with China – ushering in a new era of electronics production.
With most electronics manufacturing having left the West, and critical supply chains rooted in the East, The Grid is the first-of-its-kind automated system that brings this vital capability back onshore and does so in half the time of a typical China quick-turn shop – four days versus nine, on average.
Due to high demand, CircuitHub is boosting capacity of its first site by five times, ahead of launching a new location in the UK in 2027. CircuitHub’s growth has enabled the company to lower its prices for customers, meaning CircuitHub has now reached price parity with similar businesses in China – which is typically where most electronics manufacturers are located.
Having operated behind closed doors since 2021, The Grid is powered by levitating movers that carry each board between robots that print paste, place parts, solder, and inspect, while AI is used to orchestrate it all. Each board takes its own route, meaning there’s no need for changeovers between designs and multiple orders can be completed at once.
Since launch, CircuitHub has shipped 2.2 million+ boards, placed over 150 million parts and served more than 26,000 engineers working across multiple sectors, including companies developing self-driving cars and satellites. With AI now accelerating design, even more teams are turning to CircuitHub to build at pace, and this demand is outpacing supply.
While other efforts to bring electronics manufacturing back to the West have focused on huge-volume plants built for economies of scale, 95% of projects today involve fewer than 10,000 units. Thus leaving most teams underserved by traditional manufacturing facilities. With The Grid, one unit of 100 designs runs as easily as 100 units of one. This is a working example of how automation can make small-batch, high-mix production viable again, onshore.
Andrew Seddon, Founder and CEO of CircuitHub, said: “For 30 years the West accepted a trade-off: design here, build in China, and wait. The Grid ends that trade-off. Every board takes its own route through the factory, so a single prototype is as easy to build as a production batch, and it’s built in Massachusetts in half the time. We’ve been quietly running it for five years, and demand is already far ahead of what we can build.”
