- Tesla said that it wants to produce 1 million humanoid robots annually by 2030
- Humanoid robot vendors abound in the space
- Humanoid robots will be important for automation and industrial AI
Elon Musk said last week that Tesla would produce 1 million Optimus humanoid robots annually by 2030, and the company is intending to start selling the robots to the public by the end of 2027.
A humanoid robot is a bipedal unit modeled after the human form that is designed to work with humans on a wide variety of tasks. Musk said they could be used in industrial tasks, as well as potentially looking after pets and seniors.
In a factory setting, the AI-enabled robots will use industrial AI and run on private networks, and are one of the key cogs in the wheel of Industry 4.0 digital transformation.
Humanoid robot rollers
Fierce looked into what other vendors are also planning to produce humanoid robots. The Chinese are already heavily into humanoid robots, but there are also other American players, and German industrial vendors and startups.
SNS Telecom & IT told Fierce that the analyst firm is monitoring the production of humanoid robots. Most of Tesla's rivals are Chinese, such as Agibot and Unitree, “with current shipment numbers ranging from hundreds to single digital thousands,” SNS Telecom & IT Director James Bennett said.
Outside of China, Boston Dynamics is planning initial deployments of its Atlas humanoid robot for Hyundai and Google DeepMind next year, and there are plans to add additional customers next year. For its existing Spot mobile robots, the company recommends the use of private LTE/5G networks over public networks for connectivity. Figure AI is another American company that is developing humanoid robots.
“In North America, the other companies of note building humanoid robots include Figure AI and Agility Robotics, which are both are scaling up with dedicated manufacturing facilities and early deployments,” noted AvidThink principal Roy Chua. “Another one, Apptronik seems to be aligning with automotive and logistics players. Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, known for its dynamic mobility, has transitioned into a fully electric industrial humanoid, with production units planned for Hyundai factories.”
Integrators and software
Traditional industrial giants like Siemens and Bosch are not directly producing full humanoid robots themselves but are actively involved in co-development efforts. “For example, Bosch and German startup NEURA Robotics are collaborating to collect physical training data from Bosch facilities, develop AI functional software, and build scalable production capacity for humanoid robots,” SNS’s Bennett said. NEURA Robotics claims to have an order book exceeding $1.2 billion.
“I think the humanoid robotics market is best viewed as a diverse ecosystem of specialized use cases, not a simple race to market dominance,” said Chua. “Siemens and Bosch aren't directly building these robots but instead acting as integrators and automation partners. Their expertise in industrial software, digital twins, and safety systems complements the hardware from robotics OEMs.”
On the software side, firms like NVIDIA and other AI startups are bringing critical IP to the mix, as scalable learning, perception, simulation, and fleet coordination are important to enabling robots to function in complex environments.
Some of the world model simulations and the vision-language-action (VLA) models will play a key role for all robotics too, humanoid and otherwise, the analyst concluded.
Despite these advances, Fierce editors aren't ready to turn grandpa over to the care of the robots ... yet.