Robotics

The next great technological revolution will happen not on screens, but in the physical world. Humanoid robots and autonomous machines are on the verge of transforming the global economy, redefining how work, productivity, and physical labor are performed.

Human labor — a $40 trillion global market — is the largest and most valuable market in existence, and it is ripe for disruption. As robotics advances, tasks once performed by humans will increasingly be delegated to intelligent machines. Robots will clean, cook, fold, wash, repair, manufacture, build, mine, harvest, lift, farm, operate, serve, nurse, govern, fight, protect, massage, dance, teach, care, and entertain.

This transformation will not be limited to humanoids. It will span every class of autonomous system — including self-driving vehicles, robotaxis, drones, warehouse and factory automation, robotic arms, surgical robots, agricultural machines, and construction bots. Together, these categories form a new industrial stack that bridges intelligence, perception, and embodiment.

The scale of this opportunity is unprecedented. Analysts project the global robotics market to expand from $80 billion today to over $1 trillion by 2035, creating nearly $900 billion in new value over the next decade alone. By 2030, an estimated one million humanoids will be operating worldwide. By 2050, that number is expected to exceed one billion, marking the largest deployment of intelligent physical agents in human history.

The Evolution Toward Physical AI

As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang described in his 2025 keynote, artificial intelligence is progressing through a clear technological curve:

Perception AI → Generative AI → Agentic AI → Physical AI.

• Perception AI taught machines to see and understand through vision and speech recognition.

• Generative AI gave them the ability to imagine and create through models like GPT and Stable Diffusion.

• Agentic AI is emerging now — AI that can reason, plan, and act autonomously through code, APIs, and digital workflows.

• The next and ultimate stage, Physical AI, extends this agency into the real world — where intelligence is no longer confined to text or pixels but embodied in machines that move, manipulate, and interact.

VADER is being built for this next phase — the era of Physical AI, where robots will not just compute but act. To power this shift, the world needs not more algorithms, but more data from human experience — the kind that teaches machines how to operate in physical reality.

The Economics of Robotics

The economics are shifting rapidly in robotics’ favor. According to data from Coatue and Goldman Sachs, the cost of building a humanoid robot — once well above $200,000 per unit — is expected to decline dramatically over the coming decade. By 2030, the one-time cost of a humanoid will likely fall below the annual wage of a single human worker in the U.S.

This convergence is a pivotal moment in economic history. Once the cost of a robot undercuts the cost of a human, and the robot’s marginal cost approaches zero, the economics of labor will fundamentally transform. A humanoid capable of working 24/7, requiring no rest, healthcare, or recurring wages, will become cheaper, faster, and more consistent than human labor across most industries.

For the first time, intelligence will scale in the physical world the way software scaled in the digital world.

Robotics and National Security

Robotics is not only an economic revolution but also a national security imperative. The nations that master robotics will secure strategic dominance in manufacturing, defense, logistics, and healthcare. Control over autonomous production, supply chains, and infrastructure will define geopolitical power in the 21st century — just as control over energy and computing defined the previous two centuries.

How Early We Are

Despite rapid progress, robotics is still in its early stages — fragmented, experimental, and far from the scale that will define the next industrial era. Most robots today operate within structured environments under narrow constraints, far from achieving the adaptability and autonomy of human labor. While breakthroughs in perception, simulation, and control are accelerating development, the field has yet to reach its inflection point — the moment when robots transition from limited tools to general-purpose, real-world robots.

The Coming Change

When that moment arrives, life will change profoundly.

Robots will handle repetitive and dangerous work, expanding human potential into creativity, strategy, and exploration. Households will have robotic assistants; hospitals will employ robotic caregivers; cities will operate through autonomous fleets; industries will scale production with minimal human oversight.

The fusion of intelligence and embodiment will blur the line between the digital and physical worlds — giving rise to machines that not only think but act.

We believe robotics will be the defining growth industry of the next decade — not just because of its economic potential, but because of its capacity to reshape human life, labor, and security. The coming era will not belong to those who only build in code, but to those who teach machines to act, move, and think in the real world.