Hyundai's AI-Powered Metaplant: Revolutionizing EV Manufacturing with Robotics and Automation

Hyundai's Metaplant Seeks to Transform the EV Industry with Cutting-Edge Automation

Hundreds of robots work alongside more than 1,300 human "Metapros" at Hyundai's new Georgia factory. Less than three years ago, these were bare fields in humble Ellabell, Georgia. Today, the vast Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant is exactly what people imagine when they talk about the future of EV and automobile manufacturing in America. I've driven the 2026 Hyundai Ioniq9 here from nearby Savannah, a striking three-row electric SUV with everything it takes to succeed in today's market: Up to 530 kilometers (335 miles) of efficient driving range, the latest features and tech, and a native NACS connector that lets owners -- finally -- hook into Tesla Superchargers with streamlined Plug and Charge ease. The success of the Ioniq9 and popular Ioniq5 crossover is deeply intertwined with the US $7.6 billion Metaplant, whose inaugural 2025 Ioniq5 rolled off its assembly line in October. That includes the Ioniq models' full eligibility for $7,500 consumer tax credits for U.S.-built EVs with North American batteries, although the credits are on the Trump administration's chopping block. Still, the factory gives Hyundai a bulwark and some breathing room against potential tariffs, and puts the South Korean automaker ahead of many rivals. With 11 cavernous buildings and a massive 697,000 square meters (7.5 million square feet) of space, it's set to become America's largest dedicated plant for EVs and hybrids, with capacity for 500,000 Hyundai, Kia and Genesis models per year. (Tesla's Texas Gigafactory can produce 375,000). Company executives say this is North America's most heavily automated factory, bar none, a showcase for AI and robotic tech. The factory is also environmentally friendly, as I see when I roll into the factory: "Meta Pros," as Hyundai calls its workers, can park in nearly 1,900 spaces beneath solar roofs, shielded from baking Georgia sun that provides up to five percent of the plant's electricity. The automaker has a target of obtaining 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Those include hydrogen trucks from the Hyundai-owned Xcient, the world's first commercialized hydrogen fuel-cell semis. A fleet of 21 trucks haul parts here from area suppliers, taking advantage of 400-kilometer driving ranges with zero tailpipe emissions. The bulk of finished vehicles are shipped by rail rather than truck, trimming fossil-fuel emissions and the automaker's carbon footprint. At the docks, some of the plant's 850 robots unload parts from the hydrogen trucks. About 300 automated guided vehicles, or AGVs, glide around the factory with no tracks required, smartly avoiding human workers. As part of an AI-based procurement and logistics system, the AGVs automatically allocate and ferry parts to their proper work stations for just-in-time delivery, saving space, time, and money otherwise used to stockpile parts. "They're delivering the right parts to the right station at the right time, so you're no longer relying on people to make decisions," says Jerry Roach, senior manager of general assembly. I've seen AGVs in action around the world, but the Metaplant shows me a new trick: A pair of sled-like AGVs slide below these electric Hyundais as they roll off the line. They grab and hoist their wheels, and autonomously ferry the finished Hyundais to a parking area, with no need for a human driver. Some companies have strict policies about pets at work. Here, Spots -- robotic quadrupeds designed by the Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics -- use 360-degree vision and "athletic intelligence" to sniff out potential defects on car welds. Those four-legged friends may soon have a biped partner: Atlas, the humanoid robots from Boston Dynamics whose breathtaking physical skills -- including crawling, cartwheeling, and even breakdance moves -- have observers wondering if autoworkers are next in line to be replaced by AI. Hyundai executives say that's not the case, even as they plan to deploy Atlas models (non-union of course) throughout their global factories. With RGB cameras in their charming, 360-degree swiveling heads, Atlas robots are being trained to sense their environments, avoid collisions, and manipulate and move parts in factories in impressively complex sequences. The welding shop alone houses 475 industrial robots, among about 850 in total. I watch massive robots cobble together "bodies in white," the building blocks of every car chassis, with ruthless speed and precision. A trip to the onsite steel stamping plant reveals a facility so quiet that no ear protection is required. Here, a whirling mass of robots stamp out roofs, fenders, and hoods, which are automatically stored in soaring racks overhead. Roach says the Metaplant offered a unique opportunity to design an electrified car plant from the ground up; rather than retrofit an existing factory that made internal-combustion cars, which even Tesla and Rivian were forced to do in California and Illinois respectively. Regarding automation replacing human workers, Roach acknowledges some of it is inevitable. But robots are also freeing humans from heavy lifting and repetitive, mindless tasks that, for decades, made factory work both hazardous and unfulfilling. He offers a technical first as an example: A collaborative robot -- sophisticated enough to work alongside humans with no physical separation for safety -- installs bulky doors on the assembly line. It's a notoriously cumbersome process to perform without scratching the pretty paint on a door or surrounding panels. "Guess what? Robots do that perfectly," Roach says. "They always put the door in the exact same place. So here, that technology makes sense." It also frees people to do what they're best at: Precision tasks that require dexterous fingers, vision, intelligence, and skill. "I want my people doing craftsmanship," Roach says. The plant currently employs 1,340 Meta Pros at an annual average pay of $58,100. That's 25 percent higher than average in Bryan County, Ga. Hyundai's annual local payroll has already reached $497 million. The company foresees an eventual 8,500 jobs on site, and another 7,000 indirect jobs for local suppliers and businesses. On the battery front, Hyundai is currently sourcing cells from Georgia and SK On, with some Ioniq5 batteries imported from Hungary. But the Metaplant campus includes the HL-GA battery company. The $4 billion plant, an joint operation with LG Energy Solutions, plans to produce nickel-cobalt-magnesium cells beginning next year, assembled into packs on site by Hyundai's Mobis subsidiary. Hyundai is also on track to open a second $5 billion battery plant in Georgia, a joint operation with SK On. It's all part of Hyundai's planned $21 billion in U.S. investment between now and 2028 -- more than the $20 billion it invested since entering the U.S. market in 1986. Even a robot could crunch those numbers and come away impressed.

Hyundai's new EV factory is teeming with robots -- and wariness about the future

The South Korean automaker's new $7.6 billion factory is a bulwark against tariffs and EV-hostile policies. Driving a 2026 Ioniq 9 SUV around the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant in Georgia can feel like a victory lap for the South Korean automaker. Hyundai's electric flagship carves out room for three America-centric rows of seats, from a booming brand whose EVs and hybrids already make up one in every four US sales. Even better, the Ioniq 9 and smaller Ioniq 5 are emerging from a futuristic new factory in America, giving Hyundai a defensible bulwark against the tariffs and onshoring fervor of Donald Trump's administration. As I watch these electric SUVs roll off a surgically clean assembly line, Hyundai's opportunistic timing looms as large as the hulking robots that help build its cars. A tour of the $7.6 billion factory also underlines how many automakers are plowing ahead with long-laid EV plans, regardless of Category 5 Washington winds that threaten to blow away Joe Biden-era support for EV manufacturing, consumer tax credits, and public charging. Seen from the air en route to Savannah, the Metaplant resembles a printed circuit board on a green background, blown up to epic scale. Eleven low-slung, pale-green buildings dot 3,000 acres of Georgia countryside, with a total 7.5 million square feet of space. One building houses a $4 billion battery plant, a joint operation with South Korea's LG Energy Solution, that plans to begin supplying cells for Ioniq models next year. The company is racing to open a second battery plant in Georgia, a roughly $5 billion joint operation with SK On. A forthcoming steel plant in Louisiana further underscores Hyundai's commitment to its largest global market. It's all part of a $21 billion investment in America between now and 2028, the vast majority pledged during the EV-friendly Biden administration. Pulling into the factory, I watch a conveyor carry freshly painted cars across a windowed bridge. It's designed to let drivers on Interstate 16 see the fruits of a plant that will ultimately produce 500,000 EVs and hybrids a year -- more than Tesla's Texas Gigafactory, with its 375,000-car capacity. Georgians may also see their tax dollars at work. The publicly supported plant already employs 1,340 "Metapros," enough to boost the automaker's annual local payroll to $497 million. Hyundai foresees an eventual 8,500 jobs on-site, and another 7,000 satellite jobs for local suppliers and businesses. That's a lot of jobs. Compared with the Detroit-area factory where I toiled in the 1980s, a depressing maelstrom of heat, dirt, toxic chemicals, and industrial accidents, this joint is like MOMA: a modern museum of manufacturing art. But the factory also highlights a catch-22 of modern manufacturing, one that Trump's economic advisors seem to overlook, intentionally or otherwise: To have any chance of competing with China's EV-and-battery juggernaut, factories must enlist growing armies of AI-enhanced robots that can potentially work 24/7 and never demand overtime or benefits. That means employing relatively fewer humans. At the factory loading docks, Autonomous Guided Vehicles, or AGVs, busily unload parts from semitrucks. Roughly 300 of these robotic sleds roam the factory with no tracks required, neatly avoiding workers or obstacles. AI informs the entire factory operation, from procurement to logistics to production. These AGVs are common in today's factories, but I've never seen them at this scale, or a certain tag-team maneuver: A pair of sleds slide below finished Hyundais as they roll off the line. They squeeze the cars' wheels in robotic arms, hoist them off the ground, and ferry cars where they need to go. I've visited car factories around the world, and this is the first I've seen where an employee doesn't have to start cars and drive them away. Automated vehicles also carry every component to the assembly line for efficient "just-in-time" installation, no humans required. That avoids wasting money and labor stockpiling huge backlogs of parts. "They're delivering the right parts to the right station at the right time, so you're no longer relying on people to make decisions" or losing time to mistakes, says Jerry Roach, senior manager of general assembly. Man's best friend does make an appearance. A pair of robotic dogs named "Spot," bred by the Hyundai-owned, Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, scan and sniff out potential defects on car welds. Those yellow-coated dogs may soon be joined by humanoid robots, the AI-driven "Atlas" models that Hyundai plans to deploy throughout its factories in the future. The dexterous biped bots -- whose ability to cartwheel, breakdance, and barrel roll already outdoes most auto workers -- appear outwardly friendly, but will strike any sentient human as a potential Terminator of jobs. (Hyundai executives insist that is not the case). The welding shop alone houses 475 industrial robots, piecing together the building blocks of a car chassis. A steel stamping plant is so spookily quiet that no ear protection is required, even as robots stamp out roofs, fenders, and other body panels in a whirling, complicated dance. As with many leading-edge factories, there are strikingly few workers beyond the assembly line itself; I spot only a few dozen at work in the cavernous welding hall. Familiar industrial robots -- but not yet humanoid Atlas robots -- even install bulky car doors on the assembly line. Roach says that job is notoriously tough for workers to manage without potentially damaging painted surfaces. Such "collaborative" robots must be safe and reliable enough to operate alongside humans without physical separation required. "This is a real-life factory of the future," Roach says. Those kinds of jobs, involving massively heavy lifting, repetitive tasks, or computerized speed and accuracy, are "prime things" to automate, Roach says. Other jobs require the tactile precision that only human hands and vision provide. "I want my people doing craftsmanship," Roach says. "I want to pay people well for the things they do well, and take away all the stuff that's tedious and boring, the jobs people don't want to do." Of course, some people might not mind tedious or heavy-lifting jobs that also pay a generous living wage. But there's no going back to the days when it took many thousands of workers to keep a factory humming; Ford's River Rouge complex, designed by Albert Kahn, employed more than 100,000 workers during World War II. Twenty-first-century carmaking also means the latest in green tech. The Metaplant targets obtaining 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Trucks that haul parts here daily from a localized supply chain are powered by hydrogen fuel cells and produce zero tailpipe emissions. The 21-truck fleet is built by the Hyundai-owned XCIENT, the world's first commercialized fuel-cell semis. Employees can park in nearly 1,900 spaces beneath solar roofs, shielded from baking Georgia sun, which provides up to five percent of the plant's electricity. The bulk of the factory's finished cars are shipped by rail rather than truck, trimming the plant's carbon footprint. Hyundai hopes those trains will work overtime shipping the 2026 Ioniq 9. Buyers will find a spacious, more affordable foil to a Rivian R1S or Tesla Model X, with 50 percent more cargo space behind its third row than Tesla. The sister car to the critically acclaimed Kia EV9 is the most expensive Hyundai yet, starting from $60,595 for a single-motor model with a modest 215 horsepower. The cocooning, thoroughly pleasant-driving SUV gets a 110 kilowatt-hour battery that supplies a generous 335 miles of driving range, or a still-solid 311 to 320 miles for AWD versions. It's stuffed with useful tech, including a curling pair of conjoined 12.3-inch screens, 100-watt USB-C connectors, and active noise cancellation. Ioniq 9 prospects may focus on a particularly compelling piece of tech: an onboard Tesla NACS connector opens the wide world of Tesla Supercharging to buyers. (The smaller Ioniq 5, which kicked off Georgia production in October, was the first non-Tesla with a native NACS plug). Like other EVs with advanced architectures of 800 or more volts, the Ioniq 9 doesn't charge at its peak rates on Superchargers. But Hyundai still cites a 10-to-80-percent refill in 40 minutes. That drops to 24 minutes on the most powerful 350-kilowatt CCS chargers from Electrify America. Ioniq 9s will come with free adapters to plug into CCS stations, opening access to a total 45,000 DC stalls in America. Hyundai was also hoping to lure Ioniq buyers with a $7,500 consumer tax credit, including by switching Ioniq 5 production from South Korea to Georgia. For the Ioniq 9 I tested -- a top-shelf, $75,000 Calligraphy AWD model with 422 horsepower from a pair of electric motors -- that credit would represent 10 percent of the price. But now the Trump administration is turning on electrified cars, the majority built in Republican-led states, in unprecedented, nearly malicious fashion. It is kneecapping those credits, blocking public money for chargers, and saddling EVs and hybrids with annual fees for road maintenance. Hyundai had also taken its lumps under the Biden administration: The IRA made its imported EVs ineligible for tax credits, despite Hyundai's pledge of billions of dollars in US investment. José Muñoz, Hyundai's global president, made it clear the company felt blindsided and unfairly sidelined from credits. The Metaplant was one answer, allowing Hyundai to shift Ioniq 5 production from South Korea. That boosts the model's percentage of US- and Canadian-made parts from a piddling two percent to 63 percent, including US-sourced batteries. For the Ioniq 9, the North American share sits at 60 percent. Finally, Hyundai could tout both American-made Ioniq models as being fully eligible for $7,500 consumer tax credits, as executives did during my plant tour. But in a bitter irony, a Hyundai that crossed oceans and moved mountains to jump-start US production of Hyundai, Kia, and luxury Genesis EVs is about to be shut out of credits. Again. There are lessons in there, somewhere. For tariff proponents, the Metaplant might be a $7.6 billion lesson in reality: No American factory can screw together a single car without some share of imported parts, including from a China that holds a near-monopoly on several raw or processed battery materials. For automakers, including (surely envious) Hyundai rivals now under pressure to onshore their own factories, the lessons are different. They must deal with the Trump administration's ever-changing tariff moods, in a business that lives for long-term clarity, regulatory consistency, and economic stability. For every EV maker, including a Hyundai Motor that seemingly did everything by the book, a conclusion appears inescapable: They are on their own. Expect no help from Washington, but rather potential hurt. The only possible strategy is to roll up their sleeves, keep their heads down, and avoid further kicks to the teeth.