Europe's first humanoid robot factory is in Serbia, and it's Chinese
The location is easy to miss on the map. Šabac, Serbia: population 55,000, situated on the Sava River about 80 kilometers west of Belgrade. Maybe not exactly the address you'd expect for a milestone in the global humanoid robot race.
And yet when AGIBOT and Minth Group opened their joint factory there in August 2025, it became Europe's first mass-production facility for humanoid robots. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić attended the opening. The timing, just weeks after the Trump administration banned Chinese humanoid robot imports on national security grounds, was not a coincidence.
What they built
Phase 1 is 3,000 square meters and cost €20 million. The facility assembles humanoid robots and robotic dogs, handles motion and vision calibration, and runs performance testing before units ship.
Target output in Phase 1: 5,000+ robots annually.
The full buildout calls for a €200 million investment and annual production capacity of 20,000 units. The facility will generate about 200 jobs in Phase 1, eventually scaling to thousands.
Minth Group is the manufacturing muscle in this partnership.
The Chinese auto parts giant, ranked among the world's top 100 automotive suppliers, counts BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen, Tesla, and CATL among its customers. It has been in Serbia since 2018, when it opened a €100 million aluminum parts plant in nearby Loznica which now employs roughly 1,000 people.
The humanoid factory is essentially an extension of infrastructure Minth spent seven years building in the region.
AGIBOT's position in the market
AGIBOT is the company actually making the robots.
Founded in Shanghai in 2023, it is currently a dominant player in global humanoid shipments: 39% market share in 2025, shipping 5,100 units into a global market of about 13,000. In the first half of 2026, it shipped 8,600+ more robots, maintaining roughly 35% of a market that has now grown to 25,000 units in a single half-year alone. Cumulative production crossed 20,000 robots by September 2026.
Revenue in 2025 hit RMB 1.05 billion with total funding raised of $314 million from investors including Tencent, BYD, JD.com, SAIC Motor, BAIC, TCL, and LG Electronics. AGIBOT is currently nearing the close of a new RMB 1-1.5 billion round at a valuation near RMB 50 billion, and is preparing for a Hong Kong IPO.
The robot lineup runs from the X1, an open-source bipedal humanoid priced under $20,000, to the A3 Ultra: 1.74 meters tall, 60 kilograms, 51 degrees of freedom, 8 hours of operation on a single charge, powered by NVIDIA's Thor processor. The product range covers research, industrial, and commercial service applications.
Why Serbia, and why now
The official answer is that Minth's existing Serbian infrastructure made the location obvious: land, labor, supply chains, and relationships were already in place.
That's true.
But the fuller answer involves the US ban. In August 2025, the FCC moved to block new Chinese humanoid robot imports, citing cybersecurity risks from internet-connected robots and potential threats to critical infrastructure. The US ban effectively closed the world's largest consumer market to Chinese manufacturers almost overnight. Senator Bill Cassidy's Humanoid ROBOT Act went further, proposing to bar federal agencies from using any robots made in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea.
China makes roughly 80-95% of the world's humanoid robots. The US ban did not create the Serbia factory, but the timing clarifies what is at stake: a production base inside Europe, using a European manufacturing partner, shipping into European supply chains.
That is a meaningfully different commercial position than pure export from Shenzhen.
Serbia is not an EU member, but it has a Central European Free Trade Agreement with most Balkan states and a Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU that eases access to European markets. It is also notably not subject to EU tariffs on Chinese goods, which have been tightening across automotive and green technology categories.
The strategic logic compounds
The humanoid market grew 432% year-over-year in the first half of 2026.
At that growth rate, manufacturing proximity to customers matters: shorter lead times, easier service, faster feedback loops for a technology still undergoing rapid iteration. European industrial customers, the factories, logistics operators, and manufacturers that represent AGIBOT's core buyers, increasingly want robots that don't ship from across the world and don't raise procurement compliance questions.
Minth's automotive customer base is also relevant here.
BMW, Volkswagen, and Toyota are already Minth customers. Those are exactly the companies now evaluating humanoid deployments at scale. The factory in Šabac sits inside a network of relationships that AGIBOT, as a three-year-old company, would otherwise spend years building from scratch.
The bet is straightforward: Europe could become a major humanoid market by 2027-2028, and any Chinese manufacturers who have built European production capacity will have a significant lead over those who haven't. Whether it plays out that way depends, of course, on how fast European industrial adoption accelerates, and whether EU trade policy eventually catches up to the Serbia workaround.
Sources
Written by
I tell stories with data and build startups. I've raised angel and VC funds, led software companies and startups, and chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Currently I write for Forbes, host several podcasts, and am starting up HumanoidMegaHub. I was TUNE's mobile economist and Singular's VP of Insights, built the research team at VentureBeat, and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In past lives I built websites, e-learning platforms, and mobile apps, and, a long time ago, was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers.”