Washington Doubles Down on Humanoid Hype While Beijing Warns of a Bubble
Silicon Valley’s next obsession has legs (literally) — but whether it can truly take off is another question. Five months after launching its AI acceleration plan, the Trump administration is now pivoting hard toward robotics, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick meeting with CEOs and drafting a potential executive order. Simultaneously, Chinese officials are sounding alarms about their own robotics boom overheating, adding urgency to America’s push for a national strategy.
Follow the leader: The numbers reveal how far behind America has fallen in the robotics race. China deployed 1.8M industrial robots in its factories by 2023 — four times the US total — while countries like Japan, Germany, and Singapore have all established national robotics strategies. Now the US is scrambling to close the gap, with funding on track to hit $2.3B in 2025 — double last year’s figure — and Goldman Sachs projecting the global humanoid market could reach $38B by 2035. Companies are pushing Washington for tax incentives, federal funding, and trade policies to counter Chinese subsidies.
- Questions hang over America’s robotics push on whether its aggressive automation will impact employment, potentially undermining Trump’s goal of reviving US manufacturing jobs.
- Robotics leaders, including Standard Bots’ CEO, are urging Congress to boost funding, expand loans, and counter China’s subsidized robotics industry.
Skeptics See Science Fiction, Not Sound Investment
Even as US firms try to catch up, China’s own officials are hitting the brakes. The National Development and Reform Commission warned that more than 150 robotics companies may be inflating a huge bubble, with heavy investment crowding out other research. They compared it to the bike-sharing fiasco that left streets littered with abandoned cycles in 2017-2018. And remember the 3D printing boom of 2013-2014 that promised a mini-factory inside your home — and the subsequent crash? This time, we got $20K humanoid robots that can supposedly do your chores.
- While TeslaTSLA, NioNIO, BYDBYDDY, and XpengXPEV have doubled down on robotics — NvidiaNVDA is also actively developing chips and models for “physical AI.”
- Privately traded humanoid Robotics Company Figure was most recently valued at an eye-popping $39B, and has plans to begin alpha testing their robots in homes this year.
Wheels, not legs: Not everyone’s buying the hype. Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks — who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT — has thrown cold water on billions flowing into humanoid startups, calling video-based learning approaches “pure fantasy thinking.” He points out that human hands contain ~17K specialized touch receptors that no robot can match, and argues that successful “humanoid” robots in 15 years will actually have wheels, multiple arms, and specialized sensors rather than human form. The industry isn’t buying the hype, the use cases are limited, and it could take many decades until we see robots useful in practice, not just in demos.