More And More Chinese Factories Are Going “Lights Out.” Should We Be Worried?

While America has its sights on re-sparking a manufacturing flame, in China, it’s already lights out.

Meaning, literally—the lights in warehouses across the country are dimming, as more and more factories there are operating independent of human intervention. These “lights out factories” speak to the ever-widening chasm in robotic manufacturing. It’s China—and everyone else.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean manufacturers here in America should be hustling to flip their own switches. Our path to competitiveness looks different—and more human.

What Is Lights Out Manufacturing?

As factories introduce increasingly robust automation into their operations, some have their sites set on a new goal: Going fully automated, to the point that humans can walk out and cut the lights behind them.

In a recent video, the Wall Street Journal dug into how automation is allowing Chinese electric vehicle-maker Zeekr to pump out up to 300,000 cars a year—more than 800 a day—just four years after it was founded. It has taken Tesla more than a decade to reach similar levels. And indeed, inside Zeekr’s operation, there’s a portion where robots work under dimmed lights, un-aided by human workers. It’s “an area of the plant so automated, and with so little human presence, that, in theory, the lights could be completely shut off,” the WSJ says.

In China, labor costs have been going up for years, the WSJ notes, and automation is seen as an important strategy to blunt the impact. The speed at which China is deploying robotics inside its manufacturing plants is unmatched. In 2023, the country installed 276,000 industrial robots, six-times that of next-best, which was Japan at 46,000, according to the International Federation of Robotics. The U.S. installed 38,000 industrial robots that year.

The Manufacturers That Can—And Can’t—Go “Dark”

It’s one thing for a highly repetitive shop to go “dark.” Plenty of the manufacturing operations that American companies outsourced to China require the same tasks done hour after hour, day after day. If you’re simply stamping the same part over and over, and you look around and everything is working as it should, then sure, you could walk out. At that point, nobody needs to be there to program the CNC. Nobody has to change the job or move anything around. And in most cases, supervisors can monitor and modify from a remote control room as needs arise.

That said, while there may be a few opportunities here in the U.S. to get to that fully automated benchmark, the vast majority never will. Even with tariffs, the most repetitive factories likely aren’t coming back—and that’s OK. Companies here generally have higher SKU volumes, which means they’re consistently switching from making one product to another, rarely doing the same thing repetitively for hours on end. There’s room for robotics to make these operations more efficient and faster, but they won’t do so without some level of human assistance.

That is to say: American manufacturers must start introducing robotics at a higher rate—it’s the only way we’ll compete globally long-term—but our north star shouldn’t be lights-out manufacturing. In fact, U.S. manufacturing is likely to enter an era in which the rate of change and technological evolution inside our factories will render a lights out strategy simply impractical. In the ideal future state of the industry, upgrades—both to the products themselves and how we make those products—will be constant.

Even at Zeekr, outside of the “lights out” portion of the operation, human workers are needed for a variety of additional tasks, like assembling internal cables. “Workers also go into the factories to perform tasks like robot maintenance,” WSJ says.

Competing Globally—While Growing The Manufacturing Workforce

The conversation about automation isn’t just about feasibility—it’s also about consequences, particularly for the American manufacturing workforce.

We can and should be automating aggressively. Our path to regaining our position as the top manufacturing industry in the world runs through technology. America possesses the ingenuity to rebuild a thriving industry and reshore much of what went overseas. We must build new, highly advanced and automated factories to compete with China.

But in our case, that doesn’t mean displacing workers. That happened already—some 2.8 million manufacturing jobs were lost from 2001 to 2018, as the trade deficit with China grew. And yet, our industry still faces a shortage: close to 2 million manufacturing roles could go unfilled over the next eight years, as the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte found.

Will we bring back every job that left? Of course not, but that’s not the goal. Instead, we’re going to use robotics to make human jobs safer, cleaner, higher tech, and more appealing. Robotics will help American manufacturers cut production costs and improve quality and competitiveness. It can also help us close the talent gap and keep production humming along in the face of such a steep talent gap. We can and should be filling our industry with higher-tech, higher-impact jobs, evolving any of the few remaining repetitive roles so they better fit the future workforce. That will require investments in reskilling. They’ll be worth it.

Lights-out manufacturing may be part of China’s playbook—but it shouldn’t be ours. America’s manufacturing future doesn’t hinge on building factories that run without people. It hinges on building smarter factories, where automation and human ingenuity work side-by-side to empower a state of constant evolution. We must invest in robotics not to eliminate jobs, but to unlock better ones: jobs that are safer, more technical, and more resilient to global pressures. The goal isn’t darkness—it’s a brighter future for American manufacturing.