America Wants to Make Its Own Humanoid Robots. That Won’t Be Easy.

His new company, Robo Inc., is the latest venture for a serial entrepreneur who has spent the previous decade chasing the next big thing, from drone photography and Bitcoin mining to importing protective gear during the Covid-19 pandemic. Building robots, however, means taking on an industry China has designated a strategic priority. That is a challenge of a different magnitude.

Mr. Haggerty plans to procure components from all over the world and make some in-house. But even as he sets out to establish a robotics beachhead in the United States, he has confronted a stark realization. China has near-total dominance of the supply chain. So building a robot entirely free of Chinese parts was not practical.

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China already manufactures humanoid robots by the thousands. A new generation of U.S. start-ups is betting that there is still time to compete.

Meaghan Tobin Amir Hamja

By Meaghan Tobin

Visuals by Amir Hamja

Meaghan Tobin is the Asia technology correspondent. She reported from Plainview on Long Island.

Teddy Haggerty knew exactly what he was up against when he decided to build humanoid robots in the United States. Since 2022, Mr. Haggerty had been the main North American distributor for Unitree Robotics, China’s leading humanoid robot manufacturer. That role has given him a close-up view of an industry Chinese companies command, producing robots more cheaply and at a scale that American manufacturers have yet to approach.

“In China, these things are just walking around the streets,” he said. “They have so much more experience than we do.”

But in a warehouse in a leafy industrial park on suburban Long Island, Mr. Haggerty, 30, is trying to pull off a seemingly quixotic task — to produce humanlike robots in the United States.