The United States: The Giant Shaking the Board with Capital and AI
The country where the most money and the most advanced AI converge. The dazzling legion, and the one weakness laid beneath its feet.
Why the United States Leads
If the past four parts unpacked the machine called the humanoid through history and the present, technology and money, the four parts from here look at the same story through the eyes of nations. The first stage is the United States. From Optimus and Figure to the workhorse robots already inside warehouses and factories, the fact that so many of the names leading today's humanoid boom are American companies is no coincidence.
There are two clear reasons the United States stands at the front. One is the deepest capital market in the world; the other is a technology ecosystem that all but invented today's artificial intelligence. We will look in turn at how these two weapons are joined, and at what weakness lies beneath that dazzling legion.
Two Flags: Tesla and Figure
At the front of the American camp stand two flags of quite different character, side by side. One is Tesla, which, as we saw in Part 2, pushes the humanoid forward with the logic of automotive mass production; the other is Figure, a startup seeking to grasp directly the artificial intelligence that will become the robot's brain.
Tesla's strengths are scale and capital, along with the artificial-intelligence experience honed in self-driving. Elon Musk has nailed the humanoid down as a core product that will determine the company's future, and that single declaration alone lifted the expectations of the entire market. Figure, by contrast, has deployed its machine at a BMW plant and once joined hands with OpenAI before turning toward its own artificial intelligence — small in stature, yet the most aggressive challenger moving along the technological front line.
The Legion of Workhorses: Agility, Apptronik, 1X
Behind the two dazzling flags sits a legion of workhorses that toil quietly not on a stage but on the job. Oregon's Agility Robotics has actually deployed its two-legged robot Digit in warehouses including Amazon's, and built a dedicated production plant to do so. Texas's Apptronik aims its Apollo machine at the factories of Mercedes-Benz and the space missions of NASA at once.
To these is added 1X, which began in Norway but takes the American stage as its core. While other firms aim at the factory, this company chose the harder road of a humanoid for the home, and drew attention with investment from OpenAI. Their common trait is clear: rather than a grand Musk-style vision, they bet first on practical usefulness that lightens someone's work today.
The Real Weapons Are Money and Brains
Yet the real weapon of this American legion lies not in the individual robots but in the two foundations that hold them all up. The first is capital. Venture investment flowing into humanoid firms has exploded in the past few years, and as giants such as Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia have leapt in directly as investors or customers, American companies have come to hold the ammunition to endure for a long time even without earning money right away.
The second is artificial intelligence. As we saw in Part 3, today's robots have shifted toward learning on their own rather than being programmed motion by motion, and the United States stands at the center of the large AI models that made such learning possible and of the chips that run them. As the figure above shows, whichever company's robot it is, in its head ultimately lie Nvidia's computation and the artificial-intelligence technology that the OpenAI era opened — and this shared foundation is the deepest moat of the American camp.
America's Achilles' Heel: The Supply Chain
Yet this dazzling picture has a shadow. The United States may hold the robot's "head," but the components of the "body" that moves that head sit, in large part, across the ocean. As we saw in Part 4, the precision reducer, the costliest handful, is led by Japanese firms, and motors and batteries too depend heavily on the supply chains of Japan, Korea and China.
In other words, the United States is overwhelming in software and capital, but in the hardware supply chain that physically machines the robot it leans on Asia. When an age of truly mass-producing robots by the millions arrives, who supplies these components, how cheaply and how reliably, becomes a variable that could catch the American legion by the ankle — which is why the next stage of this series can only be Japan.
But the Parts Lie Across the Ocean
The United States has reached the front of the humanoid race with two weapons, capital and artificial intelligence. That it is the country where the most money gathers and the most advanced brains are made is a clear strength. Yet in the shadow of that strength lies a weakness: a great many of the components that make up the robot's body sit across the ocean.
So what lies across that ocean? The stage of the next part is Japan. Once the very synonym for the humanoid through ASIMO, it now seems to have stepped back from the flashy contest of finished products, yet it quietly holds the costliest parts inside the joints of American robots. We continue with the story of that quiet powerhouse.
- Part 1 · History — From Clockwork Automata to ASIMO and HUBO
- Part 2 · The Giants of Today — Atlas, Optimus, Figure, Unitree
- Part 3 · The Engineering — Locomotion, Actuators, Reducers, AI, Batteries
- Part 4 · The Stock Value Chain — Where the Robot Turns into Money
- Part 5 · United States — The Giant Shaking the Board with Capital and AI
- Part 6 · Japan
- Part 7 · Korea
- Part 8 · China
References · Sources
- Public announcements and press coverage of U.S. humanoid firms (Tesla, Figure, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X).
- Coverage of venture investment trends in the humanoid field and of Big Tech investment and partnerships (Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia).
- Announcements on AI accelerated computing and robot development platforms (Nvidia and others).
- Materials on Boston Dynamics' acquisition by Hyundai Motor Group and the reveal of the electric Atlas.
Image credits
- Tesla Optimus — Sikander Iqbal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Boston Dynamics Atlas — DARPA, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.