Wall Street's confidence in humanoid robots just hit a new peak, with Goldman Sachs revising its 2035 market forecast from $6 billion to $38 billion, a sixfold increase driven by breakthroughs in AI training and plummeting hardware costs. Yet this explosive growth comes with a major complication: the company leading on volume and price is now the subject of a bipartisan congressional push to restrict its technology from U.S. infrastructure.

The shift from hype to hard evidence happened fast. In 2026, commercial humanoid robots moved from pilot programs into real factory floors. Agility Robotics' Digit robot has moved more than 100,000 totes at a GXO Logistics facility since June 2024, and in February 2026, the company signed a Robots-as-a-Service agreement with Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. Seven Digit units now handle material logistics at the Woodstock, Ontario plant where Toyota builds the RAV4. Boston Dynamics' electric Atlas has sold out its entire 2026 production allocation, with first deployments going to Hyundai. Figure AI's Figure 02 completed an eleven-month deployment at a BMW plant in South Carolina, where two robots assisted in assembling more than 30,000 cars and handled more than 90,000 sheet metal parts.

"Humanoid and industrial robotics, with physical AI as a core, is where I expect the next trillion-dollar company to emerge," stated Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank.

Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank

How Did Humanoid Robot Costs Drop So Dramatically?

The price collapse from $150,000 in 2023 to $40,000 to $60,000 in 2026 wasn't driven by manufacturing tricks. Instead, it came from a software paradigm shift called sim-to-real transfer, where robots learn their entire behavioral repertoire in a physics simulator before being deployed to physical hardware with zero additional tuning required.

The technical architecture works like this: Agility Robotics' whole-body control system for Digit is an LSTM-based neural network with fewer than one million parameters, trained in NVIDIA's Isaac Sim for what amounts to decades of simulated experience over just three to four days of compute time. Figure AI uses a reinforcement learning approach in which thousands of virtual robots with randomized physical parameters are trained simultaneously, with the policy then applied directly to factory hardware. NVIDIA's GR00T N1 model operates as a Vision-Language-Action architecture, a dual-system design in which a vision-language module interprets the environment and a diffusion transformer module generates continuous motor commands in real time, both trained end-to-end on a mixture of real robot trajectories, human video, and synthetically generated data.

• Actuators: Account for 35 to 40 percent of the bill of materials, with Chinese manufacturers like Unitree driving costs down by approximately 50 percent through domestic production at scale
• Batteries: Represent 15 to 20 percent of costs, with prices falling to roughly $100 per kilowatt-hour in 2026
• Onboard Compute: Makes up 10 to 15 percent of the cost, with commoditized hardware becoming widely available

The economics that follow are direct. Agility's Robots-as-a-Service rate at Toyota is approximately $30 per hour per robot, bundling hardware, software, over-the-air model updates, and maintenance into a single operational line item. This allows manufacturers to adopt the technology without upfront capital expenditure.

Why Is China Winning the Humanoid Robot Race?

China is currently the clear leader in humanoid robotics volume. Unitree Robotics, headquartered in Hangzhou, shipped approximately 5,500 units in 2025 and is targeting 10,000 to 20,000 in 2026. Chinese companies accounted for a majority of 2025 global humanoid installations, reflecting an early-mover advantage that Western competitors, still largely in pilot phases through most of that year, had not yet closed.

"China is currently the clear leader in humanoid robotics, with the U.S. playing catch-up," noted Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities.

Dan Ives, Managing Director at Wedbush Securities

That volume advantage, however, now carries structural complications. On June 1, NVIDIA announced that its first publicly available humanoid robotics research system, combining Unitree's H2 chassis with NVIDIA's Jetson Thor hardware and Isaac GR00T software, would be made available to academic research labs including Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego. The announcement prompted immediate scrutiny because Unitree is a Chinese company subject to Article 7 of China's National Intelligence Law, enacted in June 2017, which requires every Chinese company and citizen to support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work. That obligation applies regardless of where the company's servers are located, where its subsidiaries are incorporated, or what its privacy policy states.

What Are the National Security Concerns?

Congressional concern over Unitree predates the NVIDIA partnership. In May 2025, a bipartisan group of 24 U.S. Representatives urged the Defense Secretary, Commerce Secretary, and FCC Chair to investigate Unitree's ties to People's Liberation Army-affiliated institutions and consider adding the company to federal security designation lists. The House Homeland Security Subcommittee held a dedicated hearing on Unitree's national security risks on March 17, 2026. Senators Rick Scott and Tom Cotton introduced the Blocking CCP Spy Tech Act of 2026 in May, which names Unitree specifically and would require a national security investigation that could result in the company being added to the FCC's Covered List, a designation that would restrict its use in telecommunications infrastructure.

No independent audit has cleared Unitree humanoid models of potential security risks, and the company's legal obligation under Chinese national intelligence law creates a structural vulnerability that cannot be mitigated through contractual agreements or privacy policies alone. This creates a paradox: the company driving down costs and enabling the humanoid robot boom is now the subject of potential U.S. trade restrictions that could reshape the entire industry's supply chain.

Goldman Sachs' revised forecast assumes that the cost compression and deployment momentum will continue, with the bank's base case calling for more than 250,000 humanoid robot shipments in 2030, almost entirely for industrial use. Whether that forecast holds depends partly on how U.S. policymakers resolve the tension between embracing the technology's economic potential and managing the national security risks embedded in its current supply chain.