2025: Another Year Of Humanoid Hype - Forbes
A central challenge is safety: whether humanoid robots are reliable enough to operate in close proximity to humans. At this year’s World Humanoid Robot Games, a Chinese-made Unitree robot lost control and collided with a person, knocking him over.
Key takeaways
The most recent headlines show a surge of commercial momentum for humanoid robots in 2026. At CES, Nvidia highlighted that its robotics platform is now powering a wave of new humanoids from companies such as Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar, LG Electronics and NEURA Robotics, while also unveiling a next‑generation vision‑language‑action model for self‑driving cars. Boston Dynamics announced a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind to embed DeepMind’s foundation‑model AI into its Atlas humanoid, and confirmed that the new Atlas is already in production and slated for deployment in a Hyundai factory, with a dedicated Robot Metaplant Application Center to collect real‑world data and an ambition to manufacture up to 30,000 units annually by 2028. Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics unit also revealed an upgraded Atlas designed for repetitive assembly tasks in its car plants, with an initial rollout planned for 2028 at a Savannah, Georgia facility and broader capabilities expected by 2030. Meanwhile, consumer‑focused humanoids are nearing market launch: the New York Post reported that the NEO Gamma robot from 1X, priced at $20,000, is taking early orders with delivery expected later in 2026, promising household functions such as folding shirts, answering doors and serving coffee. Together, these developments indicate that humanoid robots are transitioning from laboratory prototypes to both industrial workhorses and near‑term home assistants.
A central challenge is safety: whether humanoid robots are reliable enough to operate in close proximity to humans. At this year’s World Humanoid Robot Games, a Chinese-made Unitree robot lost control and collided with a person, knocking him over. Last month, Figure’s former head of safety systems sued the company for wrongful termination, alleging he was fired after raising serious safety concerns with management. Those concerns included an incident in which a robot malfunctioned, narrowly Market estimates are escalating rapidly: last year, Goldman Sachs said the humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion by 2025; this year, Morgan Stanley raised the bar when they said the humanoid market would reach $5 trillion by 2050. These astronomical figures are catnip for venture capitalists, who are taught to invest in companies that can scale broadly. Since the promise of humanoids is to do anything a human can do, they are a vast market opportunity. Robotics in Silicon Valley has long played second fiddle to software. But the sector heated up this year as investors—buoyed by generative AI’s success—turned to humanoid robotics as the next frontier. In the third quarter of 2025, venture capitalists wrote more checks for industrial humanoid robots than for any other sector, including AI coding startups and large language model developers, according to CB Insights.
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