Rivian’s in-house chip is now going into Mind Robotics’ robots, and those robots should start working inside the Normal plant in the middle of 2027, RJ Scaringe said in a new Builders episode with Kleiner Perkins, which led Mind’s latest funding round.
Until now, Rivian had only described Mind as a possible use case for RAP1. RJ now says the chip is “also being deployed” in Mind’s robots, so the silicon behind R2’s Gen 3 hardware has a second customer from the start.
He called the chip “a half a billion dollar decision,” made about four years ago. Putting it in both cars and robots makes that number easier to justify. It also lines up with Vidya Rajagopalan saying in September that the lower-performance version of Gen 3 hardware “will be cheaper than the Gen 2 hardware.”
The timeline slipped a bit. This summer RJ said the first robots would land in a Rivian plant in “the early part of 2027,” and now it’s “middle of next year.” At launch they’ll handle about 20% of a plant’s tasks, starting with pick-and-place work like moving parts from a rack into a fixture. The goal is to reach 80% on the same hardware as the AI model gets better.
Rivian’s stake in Mind is now 31%, down from 53.5% when it launched last November. Mind has since raised more than $1 billion and brought on Doug Field as president.
A chip that ships in both vehicles and factory robots gets more volume behind it. That gives Rivian more reason to keep investing in the hardware R2 owners are buying into.
