Silicon Valley spent the last few years teaching AI to talk. Now it wants to give AI a body to lift, sort, build, and eventually live alongside us.
This weekend offered a glimpse of how quickly the biggest AI players are moving in on humanoid robotics. At Nvidia GTC Taipei, the company announced a standard humanoid robot blueprint for academic researchers, expected to be available in late 2026.
On Sunday, Sam Altman declared robotics the company’s next frontier and made a callout for talent.
“In the short term, we are focused on robots to support skilled workers to build our future infrastructure; in the long term, we imagine everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need,” Altman wrote on X.
Robotics has become tech’s latest arms race, with Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta, Tesla, and a flock of startups racing to give AI a body. Companies and research labs are racing to build humanoids, specialized robots, and the software brains that could help them navigate the real world.
“Physical AI” is the buzzword of the moment in the Valley, a term popularized by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to describe AI systems that can act in the physical world.
One of the buzziest Silicon Valley robotics upstarts, Figure AI, has been trying to prove its technology can move from demos to real work. The startup, most recently valued at $39 billion, had its humanoids tag-team a week of package sorting that drew millions of viewers in May. Weeks later, the company signed a commercial agreement with Catalyst Brands, the parent company of JCPenney, Aéropostale, and Brooks Brothers, to deploy humanoids in its distribution and logistics network.
In the battle to make robots a reality, companies are scooping up top robotics talent, raising massive venture rounds, and turning robot demos into viral online spectacles — from robotic hands playing the piano to humanoids sorting packages.
Venture capital investment in global robotics and physical AI has grown from around $4 billion in 2019 to $26 billion in 2025, according to PitchBook data. So far this year, companies in the space have raised more than $23 billion.
‘A multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity’
Nvidia’s latest venture into robotics combines a robot body from Unitree, a Chinese robotics company, five-fingered hands, Nvidia onboard computing, and software tools, so researchers do not have to stitch everything together from scratch. Nvidia said it is launching the design as demand for general-purpose humanoids accelerates and researchers still face a fragmented process for building and testing them.
“Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity,” Huang said.
Jade GAO / AFP via Getty Images
OpenAI is also ramping up its investment in robotics, a sharp reversal from 2020, when the company shuttered the project behind a robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s Cube. The team is teaching a robotic arm how to perform household tasks as part of an effort to build a humanoid robot, Business Insider reported earlier this year. OpenAI currently has job openings for several roles in its robotics lab, including machine learning engineers, data acquisition managers, and 3D printing technicians.
Meta, too, is bolstering its robotics efforts. Last month, the company acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence for an undisclosed sum. The startup was building AI models for humanoid robots, and its team joined Meta’s AI unit, Superintelligence Labs.
The big wildcard is Tesla. Elon Musk has repeatedly described Optimus as central to Tesla’s future, but the company has disclosed few details about the humanoid robot’s progress. Musk said at the World Economic Forum earlier this year that Tesla would probably sell Optimus robots to the public by the end of 2027 and that the robots were already doing simple tasks at Tesla’s factories.
Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics is also pushing toward industrial use, with Hyundai planning to deploy tens of thousands of Atlas humanoids in its factories by 2028. Agility Robotics is further along in commercial deployments. Its Digit humanoid has been deployed with customers including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre.
