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.
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.
Companies that went to great lengths to cut China out of their supply chains were in the end just making a more expensive product, he said. It was far more cost-effective to import certain parts, like batteries and the aluminum skeleton that makes a robot’s body.
“There are some pieces that are already dialed in — what are you doing changing them?” he said. His office, in Plainview, shares space with a workshop littered with spare robot heads and hands, where a small team of engineers builds custom parts to adapt humanoid and four-legged robots for use in warehouse and health care work.
In some ways, Mr. Haggerty is caught between China and Washington, where officials have called for more robots to be made in the United States. He believes the result will be a more fragmented global market for humanoids: Chinese robot companies will continue to sell in their home market, while companies like his will compete for customers in the United States.
The United States and China are already vying for supremacy in artificial intelligence and semiconductors. Now robots that look and move like humans are increasingly emerging as another front in that competition. Companies in both countries increasingly see robots as the physical embodiment and next evolutionary step of A.I.
The geopolitical tensions came into sharper focus last month when the Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on the import of new models of foreign-made humanoid robots into the United States, citing national security concerns. The measure did not explicitly target China, but most new humanoid robots are made by Chinese companies.
This technology is still in the early stages of development, but supporters envision a future when humanoid robots become commonplace: cleaning homes, checking vitals in hospitals and working hazardous jobs in mines and chemical plants. But such activities would also give robots access to vast amounts of data about where and how people lived. For the United States government, this is potentially too sensitive for machines not made in America.
Right now, though, very few are.
China’s robotics industry was built on billions of dollars in state funding and grew out of the country’s world-beating electric vehicle industry. The country’s leading humanoid robotics start-up, Unitree, is preparing to go public in Shanghai at a valuation of $9 billion.
Fledgling U.S. robot makers will need substantial financial and policy support to compete, said Sunny Cheung, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank that studies Chinese government influence. “Merely banning Chinese robots is just the first step,” he said.
In the United States, humanoid robotics is still in its infancy. Analysts estimate that the top humanoid companies made just a few hundred robots last year. Most aren’t available for purchase by the average consumer, but instead are part of test projects with other companies in warehouses and factories. By comparison, Unitree and another Chinese company, Agibot, together made about 10,000.
Even Elon Musk’s Optimus line of humanoids, which he recently predicted would be “the biggest product ever,” relies heavily on components made in China.
And makers of non-humanoid robots, like iRobot, the American company behind the Roomba, have struggled to compete with Chinese rivals. The Chinese supplier of iRobot took control when the company filed for bankruptcy in December.
And Chinese humanoids are far cheaper and more widely available than their American counterparts. Unitree’s flagship humanoid retails for under $14,000.
Mr. Haggerty said that after he appeared at a trade show in Las Vegas alongside a Unitree robot last year, he was flooded with inquiries from companies like Amazon and OpenAI that wanted to try out humanoids. They wanted more robots than he could import.
Start-up founders and investors say it is virtually impossible to set up factories in the United States that could compete with the output of China’s supply chain on cost. It is more expensive to pay American workers. And raw materials, from the lithium in the batteries to the aluminum molded into the skeleton, have to be obtained from China anyway.
China’s dominance over the supply chain for robots that act like humans is closely tied to its electric vehicle industry. China became the largest E.V. exporter by focusing on producing virtually every component domestically, from screws to lithium-ion batteries. Now, many of the same companies that manufacture parts for electric vehicles supply robot makers, too.
“If you are in China and you need a component, you can get it immediately — where in the United States you might get it in a couple of days,” said Brad Porter, the chief executive of Cobot, a robotics company in Santa Clara, Calif.
Mr. Porter previously spent more than a decade at Amazon, where he led the company’s effort to use robots. He pointed to Amazon’s factory in Massachusetts where it makes equipment for its warehouses as an example of successful American robot making. But these are not humanoids. They are robotic devices that convey large loads across factory floors. Mr. Porter said humanoid robots were not the right solution in most situations for Amazon.
“There was no use case at Amazon where legs conferred any advantage,” he said.
The actual usefulness of humanoids remains a live debate. Even robotics company executives concede that people are still far more efficient workers than the robots, which struggle to make complex decisions in rapidly changing settings.
While Chinese companies have a lead on producing humanoid robots, none have demonstrated a clear use case for the technology.
Chinese robots, including Unitree’s, have drawn international attention for coordinated dancing displays on Chinese television and at the Super Bowl. But these robots are following preprogrammed scripts. Creating robots capable of complex decision-making in response to the changing world remains a challenge.
More broadly, China has already established another key lead in robotics: using robots to automate manufacturing. In 2024, according to a report by the International Federation of Robotics, a nonprofit trade group, more than two million robots were working in Chinese factories, and another 300,000 were installed — more than in the rest of the world combined.
