Comprehensive Analysis of Key Trends in the Humanoid Robot Industry for 2026

2026 will be a pivotal year for the humanoid robot industry, a time of both opportunities and challenges. Market enthusiasm will continue to rise with lingering short-term speculative hype, yet the stark gap between humanoid robots’ demonstrative capabilities and practical utility will be faced head-on. Key events including the launch of Tesla’s Optimus Gen 3, intensified policy support in China and the US, tech giants’ market entry, and industry reshuffling will unfold one after another. Amid rapid development, the industry will gradually return to rationality. In the long run, this track boasts staggering potential: the global market size is projected to reach $75 trillion by 2050, making it one of the most explosive sectors in the coming decades.

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Global Competitive Landscape: China and the US in the Lead, Widening Technological Gap

A dual-core competitive landscape driven by China and the US has taken shape in the current humanoid robot industry. The two countries each hold advantages in policy support, industrial ecology and technological paths, yet the technological gap is widening at a faster-than-expected pace. According to Morgan Stanley research, China’s strengths in manufacturing commercialization and policy coordination are reshaping the value chain of the global robot industry.

1. US: Intensified Policies and Tech Breakthroughs Led by Giants

The US government is elevating its robot strategy to a national level. As reported by Politico, the Trump administration plans to expand its technological agenda from AI to the robotics field, with Secretary of Commerce Howard explicitly stating a "full push" for the development of the robot industry. The White House is formulating a national robot strategy and executive orders, aiming to maintain global technological leadership through policy leverage.

At the industrial level, the US is centered on tech giants and start-ups, focusing on R&D of AI algorithms, foundational models and high-end hardware. The iteration of Tesla’s Optimus, and large-scale financing for start-ups such as Physical Intelligence (jointly invested by Amazon and NVIDIA) and Skild AI (valued at over $1 billion), all reflect the US’s leading position in core technology fields.

2. China: Intensive Policy Implementation and Highlighted Manufacturing Advantages

China has incorporated embodied intelligence—the core technology of humanoid robots—into the six breakthrough industries of the 15th Five-Year Plan, forming a three-tier support system of "national strategy - local policies - industrial funds":

l  Local policies: Cities including Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai have set clear industrial goals, providing R&D subsidies, procurement subsidies and financing interest discounts of up to 60 million RMB;

l  Industrial funds: Special funds with a total scale of approximately 187 billion RMB have been established nationwide, covering the entire industrial chain of robotics;

l  Manufacturing advantages: Enterprises such as BYD, Huawei and DJI have deployed cross-sector layouts, forming a collaborative innovation model of "automotive electronics + robotics".

Outlook for Humanoid Robots and Their Core Components

The global stock of humanoid robots is expected to reach 1 billion units by 2050, with global revenue from humanoid robots exceeding $70 trillion—among which China’s humanoid robot revenue will approach 10 trillion RMB.

Joint modules are the core components enabling the relative movement of various parts of robots. In recent years, the gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend has left the manufacturing industry facing labor shortages and high costs, driving up the demand for "machine substitution". Meanwhile, high-end manufacturing has increasingly stringent requirements for production precision and automation, leaving enormous room for the improvement of automation penetration. The rise of artificial intelligence has spurred the development of humanoid robots, leading to a growing demand for robot joint modules.

With the continuous commercialization of application scenarios in the robot industry, China’s robot joint module market size is expected to reach 68.927 billion RMB by 2030. In the segmented market, collaborative robots are the main current application scenario; humanoid robots are expected to become the main incremental application scenario in the future, with China’s humanoid robot joint module market size projected to reach approximately 59 billion RMB by 2030.

The future development trend of the industry is clear: product development focuses on integration, miniaturization and precision. High-load bearing capacity and rapid dynamic response capabilities required for high-precision operations and humanoid robot development will become new challenges for joint modules.

Currently, the humanoid robot industry in 2026 is at a critical inflection point of "moving from the laboratory to the real world". It is buoyed by the upsurge catalyzed by policies and technologies, while also facing practical tests of commercialization and industry reshuffling—and the real first year of large-scale commercialization is yet to come.