Near-term revenue belongs to the motion and sensor companies supplying the industry's buildout
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has called humanoid robots a "multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity."
Jensen Huang has taken to calling robotics and physical AI the next trillion-dollar opportunity for Nvidia (NVDA), and the market takes the company's CEO at his word. Nvidia's physical-AI revenue has run past $9 billion over the trailing 12 months, up from $6 billion the year before, and analysts now treat robots as its second act.
Nvidia's ambition is to do for robotics what its CUDA platform did for accelerated computing. Huang has called humanoid robots a "multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity." Nvidia's newly announced Halos for Robotics safety stack sharpens the point: The company is building the software, compute and safety layer around humanoids, not trying to own the entire machine. Nvidia wants the operating layer underneath - and if physical AI scales the way factory automation has, it will get it.
That's the bull case - and it holds. The catch is the timing. The revenue Huang points to is years from mattering; most of today's physical-AI money is self-driving and factory automation rather than humanoids. Nvidia just folded the whole business segment into a new "edge computing" line where it cannot be sized on its own. For scale, fiscal 2026 brought in $215.9 billion in total revenue, with data center at $193.7 billion and the line that bundled automotive and robotics together at $2.3 billion, almost all of it self-driving.
The platform thesis is not yet where the cash is. That cash now is showing up one layer down, in the companies Nvidia is pulling into its ecosystem: motion, sensing, power and factory-automation suppliers that already sell to real customers. Right now, Nvidia is the architecture bet. Humanoid-robot makers are the lottery tickets. The cleaner trade is in incumbents that can ride the robotics build-out without needing the humanoid future to arrive on schedule.
The case for the suppliers rests on a number the consultancy McKinsey put in print in April: Actuators account for 40% to 60% of a humanoid robot's bill of materials, with sensing another 10% to 20% and compute 10% to 15%.
The single most valuable component sits in one of the least developed supplier ecosystems in the stack. Value is concentrated exactly where capacity is thinnest. For investors, that makes the first question simple: Does the company sell into a bottleneck, or into the broader humanoid dream? The closer a supplier sits to motion, sensing, safety or factory integration, the more likely it is to see revenue sooner. The farther it sits from those bottlenecks, the more it depends on the full robot story arriving on schedule.
That is where the contracts are landing. In May, German motion-technology group Schaeffler (XE:SHA0) agreed to deploy up to 2,000 robots from U.K. startup Humanoid across its plants by 2032. It also became Humanoid's preferred supplier for more than half its joint-actuator demand through 2031, a deal expected to cover a seven-digit number of units, meaning at least 1 million. One robot rollout converted into a recurring component order book. Schaeffler itself reckons actuators are about half the bill of materials in many humanoids, which tells you where it wants to sit.
The base this plugs into is already large. The International Federation of Robotics counted 542,000 industrial robots installed in 2024, more than double the number a decade earlier and the fourth straight year above 500,000 units. China took 54% of deployments; South Korea was the fourth-largest market by annual installs. South Korea is a memory, electronics, automotive and robotics hub, and Nvidia wants it inside the supply chain, not merely buying chips at the end of it.
Early-stage investments
For investors hunting the Tier 1 suppliers of physical AI, the layers Nvidia is wiring up sort into a few buckets.
Actuators, motors and gears are the muscles and the clearest near-term business case; beyond Schaeffler, Bosch has tied up with Neura Robotics and Magna has taken a stake in Sanctuary AI.
Sensors and edge compute are the eyes and the brain, and that contest is not settled: Nvidia's Jetson Thor anchors onboard inference, but Qualcomm $(QCOM)$ has launched a humanoid-specific processor, the Dragonwing IQ10, and is courting Figure Technology Solutions (FIGR) and Neura.
Not every company in those buckets is a buy - but these are the buckets where investors should look first for backlog, design wins, margin commentary and customer concentration.
Power, cooling and integration are where AI-factory money already flows. Integration is its own moat: With a global install base above 2 million robots, Fanuc (JP:6954), ABB (SE:ABB), Yaskawa Electric (JP:6506) and Kuka are folding Nvidia's Omniverse and Jetson modules into their controllers and virtual-commissioning tools. They do the line redesign, safety certification and fleet monitoring that decide whether any humanoid scales past a pilot.
One risk belongs in every model: High-torque actuators depend on rare-earth magnets, and China controls roughly 90% of magnet processing, a chokepoint that recent export-licensing changes have already made twitchy.
None of this requires picking the winning robot. Whether the form has legs, wheels or a tower, it still needs actuators, sensors, edge compute, safety systems and someone to bolt it into a line. Those line items get paid either way.
That leaves investors with a clearer path than the headlines suggest: own the platform for versality and flexibility, screen the suppliers for revenue, avoid paying up for the humanoid demos. Nvidia remains the platform option, but its robotics revenue isn't a near-term earnings driver.
The broad robotics build-out is already shipping; the bipedal version is the part still living in highlight reels, so be wary of pure humanoid stories until the order book is visible.
Jurica Dujmovic is a MarketWatch columnist. Follow him on X @JuricaDujmovic.
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-Jurica Dujmovic
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July 01, 2026 12:13 ET (16:13 GMT)
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