By Nicholas Gordon
Publication Date: 2025-11-20 23:00:00
Foxconn, the Taiwan-based manufacturing partner of companies like Apple and Nvidia, and Intrinsic, an AI and robotics company under the Alphabet umbrella, are investing in a joint venture that will deploy robots in Foxconn’s U.S. factories, according to a statement from Intrinsic released Thursday evening.
“Foxconn just has huge manufacturing expertise,” Wendy Tan White, CEO of Intrinsic, said to Fortune in an interview. She added that Foxconn, perhaps best known for its work assembling Apple’s iPhones, will know which parts of the manufacturing process can be best improved through AI.
Intrinsic is a graduate of Alphabet’s moonshot program, focused on developing breakthrough new technologies. Developers worked on ways to make industrial robots easier and cheaper to use; Alphabet debuted the firm as a separate company in 2021.
In particular, Intrinsic focuses on flexible manufacturing, or developing automated systems that can respond to new data, self-optimize, and adapt how they work. Currently, industrial robots are best applied to predetermined tasks, and it is difficult
—and expensive—to change how they work. That’s why human labor, in many situations, is still a better option for manufacturers that need flexibility.
White says that Intrinsic and Foxconn had been in conversations for “maybe a year or two now,” and that it was “inevitable” that the electronics manufacturing giant would want to cooperate with Intrinsic on…