US vs China.
Deployment, humanoids, supply chain and capital, compared metric by metric, plus the SemiAnalysis Unitree comparison.
Across 28 metrics:14 favor China4 favor the US10 contested
Industrial robot installations — US vs China vs rest of world
Units installed per year, 2015 to 2025, cobots included. Rest of world is an approximate residual of rounded IFR figures.
Deployment & density
| Metric | United States | China |
|---|---|---|
| Industrial robot installs (2025) | 38,400 units (+12%) — second-largest market, ahead of Japan | 354,200 units (+20%) — 59% of worldwide industrial installations |
| Robot density (2024; per 10K manufacturing workers)
IFR previously published 470 for 2023 on earlier labor data. The 2023 and 2024 figures are not a same-basis trend.
|
307 — eighth worldwide | 166 — 22nd worldwide using updated Chinese labor data |
| Operational industrial robot stock (end-2024) | 393,700 robots operating in factories | Over 2 million — the largest operational stock of any country |
| Humanoid sales / installations (2025)
The estimates use different definitions and are not interchangeable.
|
Country-specific sales not reported in IFR’s public release | Counterpoint estimates over 80% of ~16,000 worldwide installations were in China. IFR reports about 7,000 full-size (>140 cm) humanoids sold worldwide for professional use beyond R&D and entertainment |
| Single largest robot fleet | Amazon — 1M+ robots across 300+ fulfillment centers | Distributed across manufacturers; no single fleet at Amazon's scale |
Traditional arms vs cobots — the AI leading indicator
| Metric | United States | China |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional industrial arms
Neither superpower leads here: Japan + Europe (FANUC, Yaskawa, ABB, KUKA) hold ~85% of arm revenue. Between the US and China, only China produces at volume.
|
Not a producer — no US firm makes heavy-duty arms; Adept was sold to Omron, Rethink's assets to Germany's HAHN. Relies on Japanese & European imports | Secondary player — passed Japan in unit production share in 2024, but no Chinese firm tops 2% of the global arm market and median Chinese-firm margins run under 1% vs over 4% industry-wide |
| Collaborative robots (cobots) | A few small entrants (Standard Bots); negligible global share | Over half of global cobot shipments since 2023; after Denmark's Universal Robots (~30%), most of the top cobot makers are Chinese |
| Cobot self-sufficiency | Imports the bulk of its cobots | ~90% of domestic cobot demand met by Chinese makers — versus 55% for industrial robots overall in 2025, down from 57% in 2024 as foreign suppliers grew 27% there (IFR) |
| Cobots and AI integration
IFR reports 66,000 cobot installations in 2025, 11% of global industrial installations. A cobot is not necessarily AI-enabled.
|
U.S. model and compute firms are developing robot AI; most industrial robots in the U.S. are imported | Chinese suppliers are strong in cobots; FAI treats the segment as a possible proxy for future AI-integrated industrial robotics |
Humanoid race
| Metric | United States | China |
|---|---|---|
| Humanoid shipment leaders | Figure ~350 built (1/hour by spring 2026); Agility single-digit units per shift | Unitree 5,500 shipped in 2025 (20K target 2026); AgiBot reported its 20,000th production-line robot in September 2026; UBTECH 1,000+ industrial units delivered |
| Entry humanoid price | Tesla reported early Optimus production in Q3 2026; a comparable public list price is not established here | Unitree G1 listed from ~$13.5–16K in 2026 reporting |
| Announced factory capacity
Nameplate targets, delivery targets and production output are different measures and should not be added as realized output.
|
≈52K/yr design targets: BotQ 12K + RoboFab 10K + Hyundai's planned 30K Atlas plant — plus Tesla's 1M/yr Fremont ambition | Unitree 20K target for 2026 alone; UBTECH 10K/yr by 2027; ~200 humanoid makers |
| Labor-replacement economics
These are different use cases, not a like-for-like cost comparison.
|
Agility and GXO report commercial Digit operation in Georgia; expansion to two more GXO sites is expected in early 2027 | SemiAnalysis estimated teleoperated Unitrees at ~$23–26/hr in a 2026 analysis |
| Unit economics
Different products and reporting scopes prevent a direct unit-margin comparison.
|
Agility reports commercial Digit operations; comparable robot-level margins are not publicly established here | SemiAnalysis estimated ~67% gross margin on Unitree G1 in June 2026 |
Supply chain & components
| Metric | United States | China |
|---|---|---|
| Humanoid component supply chain | Figure builds actuators in-house; U.S. merchant suppliers include Cone Drive | China has a broad component supplier base; a comparable global humanoid-component share is not established here |
| Cost to build the same robot
This 2025 estimate covers one modeled arm, not every robot or supplier.
|
SemiAnalysis estimated a modeled UR5e-class arm would cost about 2.2× as much to build in the U.S. | The model uses Chinese component and production costs as its baseline |
| NdFeB magnet production | MP Materials began commercial magnet production in 2025; its planned 10X facility targets 7,000 t/yr at full capacity | Adamas estimated over 90% of global NdFeB magnet production in 2025; export licensing began in April 2025 |
| Rare-earth separation & refining | ~5% of global capacity; first US heavy-REE output in decades (Energy Fuels, Mar 2026) | ~91% of global capacity; ~99% of heavy rare earths |
| Precision reducers | Harmonic Drive produces in Beverly, Massachusetts; Cone Drive manufactures harmonic gearing in Traverse City, Michigan | Chinese reducer makers compete with established Japanese suppliers; a comparable global share is not established here |
| Automotive lidar (2024) | Ouster reported $169M revenue in 2025 across its lidar business | Hesai, RoboSense, Huawei and Seyond held 89% of the automotive lidar market by Yole’s 2024 estimate; this is not a robot-lidar share |
| Battery cells | Figure builds packs in-house; EnerSys announced a South Carolina lithium-ion cell facility targeting production in 2028 | Chinese firms supplied about 70% of global EV battery installations in 2025; that is an EV proxy, not a robot-cell share |
| Dexterous hands | Research-grade, low volume (Psyonic; Shadow in UK) | Linkerbot claims >80% of high-DoF hands; 10,000th shipped Nov 2025 |
| Robot brains (compute & chips) | NVIDIA Jetson Thor is the de facto humanoid standard — used by Chinese OEMs too; Qualcomm, Ambarella alternatives | Dependent on US chip designs; domestic alternatives under export-control pressure |
| Robot foundation models | Physical Intelligence ($5.6B), Skild ($14B), NVIDIA GR00T, Figure Helix — the deepest bench | Fast followers; Unitree is the leading platform for humanoid AI research but the frontier models are American |
Capital & policy
| Metric | United States | China |
|---|---|---|
| Venture capital
Different years and scopes prevent a direct country comparison.
|
Figure and Skild drew large U.S. venture rounds; a cited tracker reports over $23B globally for robotics in 2026 to midyear | Older estimates put humanoid-firm funding at ~$769M in 2023 and ~$990M in H1 2024 |
| Public-market access | Symbotic, Serve, Ouster listed; Agility became the first U.S. humanoid listing on Nov 5, 2026 (Nasdaq: AGLT) via a SPAC that raised about $465M | Unitree's STAR Market IPO approved in a record 73 days at ~$6.2B; UBTECH already listed in HK. After its Aug 19 STAR debut Unitree fell about 53% from its first-day high by mid-September |
| Government posture | DoD OSC loans + MP price floor (~$3B+ committed to magnets); National Commission on Robotics Act proposed (H.R. 7334 / S. 4686); GUARD Act introduced; House-passed FY2027 NDAA would restrict DoD obtaining foreign-adversary humanoids (Sec. 163); Unitree on the Pentagon 1260H list since June 8 | 15th Five-Year Plan approved March 12: robotics as a strategic emerging industry, embodied intelligence as a future industry; AI+ adoption and application pilots; national humanoid standards (2026); 'Robot+' density-doubling roadmaps; MIIT draft (comments closed Sept 23) proposes 100+ humanoid standards by 2028; on Nov 5 its foreign-investment security review blocked SoftBank's $5.4B purchase of ABB Robotics over robot data leaving China; Beijing's Nov 11 action plan targets 5 world-class and 10 leading domestic humanoid makers, 50,000+ PFlops of embodied-AI compute and 25% of national robot capacity in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region by 2028 |
| Hardware iteration speed | Quarters — supply loops cross the Pacific | Weeks — proximate suppliers from the smartphone/EV ecosystem |
Case study: Unitree vs the U.S. humanoid stack
SemiAnalysis calls Unitree the proof of the 'DJI strategy' — bootstrap through researchers and hobbyists, own the bottleneck components, then ride ecosystem maturity into every adjacent market. Here is how it stacks against the American approach, dimension by dimension.
| Dimension | Unitree | US humanoid OEMs |
|---|---|---|
| Cumulative humanoids shipped | ~10,000th unit approaching (June 2026); 5,500 shipped in 2025 alone | Figure 350+ built by spring 2026; Tesla reported early Optimus production in Q3 2026 without a production count |
| Price trajectory | $50K+ → $27.3K in 12–18 months; under $20K in some deals; G1 from ~$16K | Commercial pricing varies by maker and contract; comparable public list prices are limited |
| Gross margin | ~67% on the G1 — profitable while cutting prices | Pre-commercial; burn funded by venture capital |
| Vertical integration | Self-developed BLDC motors (30–40% of Western motor cost), planetary gearboxes, lidars, depth cameras | Figure builds actuators/packs in-house at BotQ; Tesla designs in-house but buys volume parts from Sanhua/Tuopu (China) |
| Decoupling status | SemiAnalysis reports a G1 configuration without American components | SemiAnalysis identifies exposure to Chinese components in U.S. humanoids; supplier origins vary by product |
| Research-platform pull | The leading platform for humanoid AI research — NVIDIA's open GR00T reference humanoid is built on a Unitree H2 Plus chassis | US labs buy Unitrees to train American foundation models on Chinese hardware |
| Where the US still wins | Buys US chip designs; frontier autonomy models are not Chinese | NVIDIA compute, foundation models (Helix, π0, GR00T), capital depth, and Amazon-scale deployment demand |
SCSP robotics commission findings
On installations, installed base and China's home suppliers.
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China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, 2026–2030
The National People’s Congress approved the plan on March 12, 2026. Chapter 5 lists robotics among strategic emerging industries and embodied intelligence among future industries. The plan calls for application demonstrations, industrial clusters and AI adoption. The relevant lists are open-ended; they do not establish “10 industry tracks” or a robotics-specific appropriation.
Original wording, Chapter 5, section 1:
加快新一代信息技术、新能源、新材料、智能网联新能源汽车、机器人、生物医药、高端装备、航空航天等战略性新兴产业发展
Chapter 5, section 2:
推动量子科技、生物制造、氢能和核聚变能、脑机接口、具身智能、第六代移动通信等成为新的经济增长点。
In English: accelerate the listed strategic emerging industries, including robotics; develop the listed future fields, including embodied intelligence, into new sources of economic growth. This is our translation.
Official plan Approval resolution US hearings and policy comparison
Method: Side-by-side synthesis of every key US-vs-China metric tracked on this site, plus the SemiAnalysis Unitree and robotics-supply-chain analyses. The 'Traditional arms vs cobots' section (added 2026-06-18) draws on FAI's 'The State of Industrial Robotics' (Michael & Alden, 2026). Industrial installations, density, stock, cobot totals, selected component and funding rows were checked 2026-10-26 against IFR, manufacturers and original research; other rows keep their earlier capture dates.. Captured as of Jun 12, 2026. "Edge" calls are editorial judgments, not scores.