Advances in generative artificial intelligence since 2022 have turbocharged the development of humanoid robots, and this is accelerating. Twenty-seven humanoid robot models reportedly debuted at Beijing’s World Robot Conference in August 2024. A few months earlier, Huang had announced a new foundation model—the underlying model on which specific uses are built—developed for controlling humanoid robots. Humanoid robots aren’t yet viable in many real-world environments but have begun operating in Amazon warehouses and factories for Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Goldman Sachs Research anticipates a market worth $38 billion by 2035, and Citibank estimates 648 million humanoid robots by 2050.

The appearance of DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese AI model that seems to rival OpenAI’s latest offerings far more cheaply, shocked markets this week and erased $1 trillion from U.S. stock values. This event underscored the stakes of America’s technology race with China—and how close that race is. But as well as competing over AI models such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek-R1, these two tech superpowers are now also racing for a new prize: robots shaped like humans, with a head, torso, arms, and (often) legs. Such humanoid robots are central to the future plans recently announced by Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker Nvidia. Huang’s vision has led Nvidia’s rise to become one of the world’s biggest listed companies. Elon Musk correctly anticipated vast markets for space launch and electric vehicles—and Musk now predicts that the long-term value of Tesla’s humanoid robots “will exceed that of everything else at Tesla combined ” and make it a $25 trillion company. Meanwhile, Chinese industrial policy is pouring a firehose of start-ups into humanoid robots.

The appearance of DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese AI model that seems to rival OpenAI’s latest offerings far more cheaply, shocked markets this week and erased $1 tri