By Al Root
The robots are coming. And a new robot company is coming for investors.
Wednesday evening, the Financial Times reported that SoftBank was going to list an AI robotics company in the U.S., valued at up to $100 billion.
SoftBank didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company, called Roze, likely includes assets, including ABB's robotics division, that SoftBank agreed to buy in October for $5.4 billion.
Those are industrial robots, which don't walk out of the factory. All the buzz recently about AI-trained robots relates to humanoids that can move freely in their environment and learn to do tasks at human levels of proficiency, thanks to AI computing.
Investors will have to see what other assets are part of Roze. SoftBank reportedly filed confidential documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Confidential filings aren't a surprise. They have become a typical way companies start their IPO journey. Eventually, filings will be made public, usually several weeks before the IPO.
The IPO will be an interesting valuation mark for robots. U.S. investors don't have many pure-play, AI-trained robotics companies. Tesla is spending billions to build robotics manufacturing capacity, but Tesla is also an EV, robo-taxi, and energy storage company.
Valuing robots is hard. There are essentially no useful humanoid robots working in the economy now, but Wall Street sees trillions in potential revenue down the road. Addressable markets are typically based on global labor markets, which are measured in the tens of trillions of dollars annually.
Wall Street's Tesla robot valuations are all over the place. RBC analyst Tom Narayan projects some $400 billion in Tesla robot sales in 2050, and values that at 10 times sales. Discounting that back works out to some $640 billion today. Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu doesn't look out to 2050. He projects 1.25 million robots sold in 2035 for about $25,000 each. That's $31 billion in revenue. He puts a 30-times multiple on that revenue, calling robots worth about $111 per share today. That works out to a $500 billion valuation based on Tesla's fully diluted share count. Morgan Stanley values Tesla's robots at closer to $270 billion.
Hyundai Motor's Boston Dynamics, on the other hand, is valued between $20 billion and $30 billion. That's a low number, relative to the others, for a company with the impressive humanoid robot, Atlas.
Whatever the numbers, a successful Roze listing could give the entire sector a boost.
Eventually, of course, robots will have to show up and do useful work to justify any of the billion-dollar valuations.
The bottleneck to robot growth might not be the brains but the brawn. AI computing is good enough to create useful robots. Right now, the manufacturing capacity and supply chain to support millions of robots simply doesn't exist.
That still needs to be built, and building out a trillion-dollar industry will take time.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 30, 2026 12:47 ET (16:47 GMT)
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