What you're reading: We built Luniter because we love science and want to know what's coming next, and which companies are actually building it. We track 200 of them. Every Monday we pick the one story from that world we think is worth your time and explain it in plain English. It takes about ten minutes. If you're new here, welcome.

What is actually inside an American humanoid robot? Tesla counts roughly ten thousand unique parts in its own, and Elon Musk told investors it "will move as fast as the least lucky, slowest, dumbest part in the entire 10,000." Trace those parts back to their makers and the answers come back Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, until you reach the part that thinks. That part is American.

A humanoid robot is mostly joints. The motorized joints that move each limb, called actuators, come to roughly half the cost of the whole machine, by McKinsey's count. Inside each one sits a precision gearbox about the size of your wrist, turning a motor's fast spin into a joint's slow strength; a robot carries roughly fourteen of them, by supply-chain estimates.

For decades, two veteran Japanese companies dominated the craft of making these gearboxes. Now a Chinese challenger sells the same part for about a third less, by supply-chain reporting, and boasts in its own annual report of mass deliveries to "international leading robot customers." The market reads that phrase as Tesla. Tesla has never confirmed a single robot supplier.

The hands are the hardest part of the robot, for every maker in the race. When Morgan Stanley took a Tesla robot apart on paper and priced every piece, the two hands came to about $9,500 of a $55,000 build. We can point to the challenge. The finest robot fingertip any maker has disclosed, from the California robot maker Figure, can feel three grams, the weight of a paperclip. Your fingertip can feel about seven hundredths of a gram, more than forty times finer.

Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, calls the idea that robots will learn dexterity by watching videos "pure fantasy thinking." Human hands are simply that good, and they are a big part of why a robot that walks and lifts is still a $55,000 tool that cannot fold a shirt.

Now go back to the joints. Every one spins on rare-earth magnets, two to four kilograms of them per robot by industry estimates. China mines most of the metals, refines nearly all of them, and manufactures about 94 percent of the world's finished magnets, by the International Energy Agency's count. When Beijing put export licenses on those magnets in April of last year, Tesla told investors the squeeze reached its robot program directly.

The American answer is mostly one company. MP Materials runs the full loop on home soil, from a California mine to a Texas magnet plant, and the Pentagon is now its largest shareholder. The Pentagon has also guaranteed it a minimum price for the magnet metal it makes, every year for ten years. That floor is the survival mechanism. The world price of these metals is set in a market China dominates, and a young plant can be starved by a price crash before it ever reaches scale; the floor means MP gets paid enough to keep building no matter what the market price does. The first magnets are with customers for testing now; commercial shipments are expected in the fourth quarter of this year.

No humanoid robot maker has announced a magnet contract with MP yet. What connects the company to robots is the expected need. For context, the world builds nearly a hundred million cars and trucks a year. On an August 6 earnings call, MP's chief executive, James Litinsky, told investors that if the world were producing 30 or 40 million humanoid robots a year, a third of the way to car scale, that alone "would eat up 100% of the rare earth magnet production globally, including China." This is the only Western company that is building the supply, mine to magnet.

One big slice of the robot is American, and it is the part that thinks. NVIDIA sells what has become the robot world's default off-the-shelf brain, a robot computer called Jetson Thor. It sits in Boston Dynamics' Atlas, in Agility's warehouse robot Digit, and in the hardware inside Figure's machines. Robots are still a very, very small share of NVIDIA's own revenue.

Tesla is the exception twice over. It designs its own robot chip instead, the design finished this April, with production split between factories in Texas and Taiwan. And at actually building robots, Tesla is the furthest behind of the American programs. It cleared two car lines out of Fremont to make room for its robot; by its own July update, the replacement lines are installed, production is anticipated "later this year," and the first robots built will go to an internal training fleet.

Scorecard — Tesla (TSLA)

The picture in one line: the most famous robot maker of all carries some of the weakest readings of the 200 we track, with growth and quality in the bottom quarter, a price a quarter below its high, and the 177th spot of 200 on our ranking list.

One honest asterisk belongs on the brain itself: NVIDIA's chips are American-designed and still mostly fabricated in Taiwan. The battery underneath everything is Korean; one Seoul-based cell maker is reported to hold the marquee contracts across Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure.

Put a price on the foreign dependency. That $55,000 robot is built on a mixed supply chain, some of it Chinese, some not. Morgan Stanley priced the same robot at the two extremes. Built entirely on China's supply chain, about $46,000. Built entirely without it, about $131,000.

Then came the government red tape, five weeks apart. In June, Beijing added MP Materials, by name, to its export blacklist. In July, Washington banned new imports of foreign mobile robots; the order names no company, leaves fixed factory arms alone, and does not touch robots already at work here.

Washington's stops finished robots at the border. Beijing's reaches the parts inside, where the dependency lives.

China is building most of the world's humanoid robots. According to the research firm Smart Analytics Global, Chinese vendors shipped more than 97 percent of them in the first half of 2026, every shape and size counted, and a large share of those were research and education units rather than robots working jobs. Tens of thousands have now been built, thousands have shipped — and the number verifiably working paid shifts outside China is still counted in dozens.

On August 19, Unitree, one of the two Chinese leaders of that industry, became the first humanoid robot maker to list in mainland China. This is the company whose robots danced and performed martial arts in the Chinese New Year gala broadcast alongside human dancers. It finished its first day of trading worth about $50 billion, on roughly $250 million of last year's sales. That valuation is about two hundred times those sales.

That is where the race stands. China is building the robots, America is racing to rebuild the supply chain underneath them, and their governments are fighting over the magnets in the middle. And even so, it is still early, because almost none of the machines built so far can yet hold a job.

We also run the Opinionated Machinery, a rules-based, fully simulated portfolio, published in the open. It holds the robot's brain (NVDA) in all three of its books; it owned the magnet maker (MP) for six weeks this spring and let it go — and it has never once traded Tesla.

Inside an American humanoid robot, the joints are Japanese and Chinese, the magnets are Chinese with the American answer still in testing, the battery is Korean, and the brain is American. If the industry scales from thousands of robots toward millions, that list becomes the race, because every foreign line on it is something a company or a government is now working to change.

Two dates will tell us. Whether MP's first commercial magnets ship from Texas in the fourth quarter. And whether Tesla's line at Fremont starts this year. We will read the parts list again when they do.

Anthony

The Luniter Observatory

Research and educational analysis only — not financial advice. Every investment carries risk.