I Toured Unitree's Factory. I'm More Bullish on the West

On Wednesday I toured Unitree's factory in Hangzhou, and I wasn't allowed to obtain pictures. In the construction that makes the actuators, the motors that run all joint, there were one or two new automated lines. The remainder of the flat was filled alongside humans functioning old-school winding machines. (Winding method wrapping copper cable about a motor's core.) I don't cognize what percent of the motors are made on the automated lines. But staffing the flat alongside humans made sense.

Unitree has a viral video (28 myriad views) of a humanoid doing gathering in its own factory, which it calls "an genuine deployment". Its IPO prospectus calls it a pilot, and says gathering is "currently chiefly manual". At the end of 2025 all of Unitree's machinery was worth concerning $1.7 myriad on its books, at a business that made nearly 32,000 robots that year: several $50 of machinery per robot!

It doesn't need more. Labour was 8% of what it disbursal Unitree to create its robots in 2025, outsourced assemblers included, and most of the remainder was parts. With those hands it made about 26,000 robot dogs in 2025, additional than the roughly 20,000 IDC reckons the entire earth shipped the twelvemonth before.

So there's lone so much a device can save: halve a disbursal that's 8% of the invoice and you preserve 4%. Unitree expects the motor row it's construction to cut the labor in all motor by additional than half, and the disbursal of one robot example by under 2%. Its labor per robot had approximately halved since 2023 (our arithmetic), and the filing credits scale, standardised processes and additional skilled staff. None of those is a machine; two are kaizen, and I named my company, KAIKAKU, following the another word.

The another logic Unitree builds by hand starts in the showroom. Our presenter told us Unitree's CEO, Wang Xingxing, asked a G1 operating GPT-6 to fetch him a flask of h2o from another room. It did. Slowly. Unitree's own glide puts robots' "ChatGPT moment", whenever they can do 80% of tasks they've never seen 80% of the time, two or three years out. That glide is from final year, so it's as shortly as next year.

Until then, humanoids are mostly toys for researchers: our presenter named Nvidia, Amazon, Meta and universities. Three quarters of Unitree's humanoid revenue came from investigation and learning in the archetypal nine months of 2025, and under 5% from factories or another manufacturing activity (half or additional of what Unitree records as "industry" is robots giving guided tours at companies!). When person asked what the GD01, a rideable mecha from $650,000, is for, the answer was that Wang had wanted one since he was a child.

A merchandise without a job changes all year, and a tradition device lone plant if the merchandise is benevolent of frozen, so a device built for this year's robot is scrap next year. It's akin tailoring a lawsuit for a teenager. Right now everything's ever-changing, apart from the motor. Unitree is automating its shared modules first since they're the parts its robots portion most. The identical Wednesday I toured his factory, Wang told a gathering in Wuzhen that Unitree had spent ten years on the robot's build and would now put its importance on the brain. When I toured a drone factory, the circuit boards and motors were made by device and final gathering was done by hand. In a drone the motor is a entire component; in a humanoid it's fractional of one, the copper-and-magnets half, and that fractional has stopped changing, akin the AA power division in a toy that's redesigned all Christmas.

In May I said China's new factories "bolt robots into all one" and the West should "erase the factory floor". The archetypal bit wasn't true of the factory I visited. For now Unitree is right. The second bit I motionless believe, and it's why I remaining Hangzhou additional bullish on the West than ever. China's robots are made by cheap hands, not machines, so the machines are motionless up for grabs, and the West is fine at construction machines. AI makes it easier: a rented System 2 example can now do much of a robot programmer's job, so the West doesn't need China's armed forces of engineers to automate the simpler work.

(The next day, at BYD, I saw the another end of this: a car factory anywhere everything I saw was automated. More on that at the end.)

Ford's archetypal row had no device in it#

Ford is the finest guide to what happens next, since he started exactly anywhere Unitree is. His archetypal moving gathering line, at Highland Park in 1913, put the magnets on Model T flywheels to create magnetos, small magnet-and-coil generators, kin to the motors on Unitree's winding floor. The activity was divided into 29 operations, all employee doing, in Ford's words, "as nearly as imaginable lone one item alongside lone one movement".

The machines came formerly Ford froze the Model T, and by 1914 Highland Park was full of particular device tools. When the Model A replaced the T in 1927, Ford close its flora for six months and rebuilt or scrapped most of its device tools, and Chevrolet outsold it for the archetypal time. A twelvemonth afterward GM changed a Chevrolet example in three weeks. Unitree, alongside a new robot all year, is GM in 1927, not Ford. In 2011 Foxconn's Terry Gou promised a myriad robots inside three years; by delayed 2016 Foxconn had concerning 40,000, and stated it was slowing downward "because humans are cheaper and additional flexible to modify to an ever-shorter existence sequence of person products".

A robot is akin a computer: most of the disbursal is the software. Programming and integrating a robot is typically 50 to 70% of the cost of the application, and all redesign method paying for the programming again. When GM put robots into its Hamtramck factory in the 1980s, they reportedly attached Buick bumpers to Cadillacs since they couldn't inform the cars apart.

When hands get too pricey, a factory has three doors:

• Organise them better, as Ford and Foxconn did in their heyday and Unitree does now.
• Find cheaper hands elsewhere.
• Automate the activity away, which has continually needed a icy part (AI is ending that).

America shuts the cheap doors#

Cross the Pacific and Unitree's sums flip. An hr of factory activity costs concerning six times as much in America as in China (our estimate), so at American wages labor would be concerning 40% of Unitree's costs, not 8%. In Hangzhou labor is the tip on Unitree's bill; in America it would be the chief course. And moving won't help: Chinese hands are being close out.

America has run this test before. In 1964 concerning half a myriad Mexican farmworkers were close out. In 1965, 20% of California's tomatoes were picked by machine; by 1970 the fig was 99.9%. The tomato was bred to be tougher and squarer, so the device could choice it. The merchandise froze to fit the machine.

In July the FCC stopped approving new humanoids and robot dogs unless they're made in America alongside additional than 65% American parts by disbursal (75% from 2029).

The Pentagon goes additional for the drones its program buys: from August 2027, their stators have to be injury exterior China and a fistful of another countries.

How the West wins#

The motor row Unitree expects to preserve 1.7% of one robot model's disbursal would preserve concerning 9% at American wages. The device is value five or six times additional in America than in Hangzhou, so the West can oversee one nobody can toggle off.

In the West, the quantity is arriving:

• Figure claims its BotQ factory has gone from making one humanoid a day to one an hour in small than four months.
• Tesla says most of a row to build a myriad Optimus robots a year is at its Fremont plant.
• Agility, which makes its Digit humanoids at its own factory in Oregon, listed on Nasdaq on 5 November alongside Foxconn foremost about $201 million of the money, although it sold just $1.8 million of robots final year.
• 1X says it makes its own motors, from a spool of copper to a completed actuator, on automated machines its engineers designed and built in Hayward, California.

Somebody has to build those lines, and we in the West are extremely fine at construction the machines that build things, equal if China passed Germany as the top exporter of device tools final year. America itself can't yet: on 28 October the White House established that it "relies on abroad imports for most types of robotics, manufacturing machinery, and their parts and components".

The nation that's abbreviated of hands normally builds the machines. Labour-short Japan did it to America: GM bought the first Unimate manufacturing robot in 1961, Kawasaki licensed it in 1968, and by 1990 America's archetypal robot makers had been sold to Europe. Now America is abbreviated of hands, and the device builders are moving in: Mazak has built 40,000 machines in Kentucky, Yaskawa volition make robots in Wisconsin, and Fanuc has bought a location in Michigan.

Then there's the programming. Paying for it is why a tradition device lone made awareness for a icy product, and AI is cutting that bill. HD Hyundai and Palantir say AI agents cut the average period to fix a robot-programming matter from 21.5 days to 7.9. Apple estimated that it would have taken up to nine months to employ 8,700 manufacturing engineers in America, versus 15 days in China. China volition have the identical AI tools, but an engineer's period is three to five times additional costly in America, so all hr AI saves is value that much more. The advantage China volition endure quickest is its armed forces of robot programmers.

Software went through all this first. Big programs used to be planned akin factories: a alter took months of programmers' time, so teams froze the spec and shipped formerly a year. These days a coding delegate makes the alter before lunch, and products container all week. In my final composition I called the robot type agentic robotics: an off-the-shelf System 2, a example akin Claude, writes the robot's program, runs it and fixes it itself, on any project a sensor can check. Everything is a drawer apart from for laundry, and most of a motor row is drawers.

China makes the magnets, but MP Materials has finished qualifying its magnets alongside GM, and its Texas factory starts deliveries before the end of 2026. BMW makes an EV motor in Steyr that uses no imperishable magnets, and wants capability for additional than 100,000 of them this year.

This is how we lose. By 2022, all of the top ten manufacturers of sun-related panel-making equipment were Chinese. China additionally makes many of the machines that build electric-car motors. Within a few years Chinese builders of hairpin winding lines caught up alongside German and Italian ones, alongside changeovers done in software, undercut them by as much as half, and have started exporting entire lines to Europe. The winder is a small part of a motor's cost, and American wages are elevated adequate that equal a winder at twice the cost motionless saves 8 to 9% of the disbursal of a robot. What the West can't oversee is one that's dilatory to alter over.

Eric Jang thinks banning Chinese hardware is idiocy and wants an American Unitree instead. Agreed! But build it alongside machines. (Disclosure: I allocate in Standard Manufacturing, which builds autonomous gathering lines, and in Dirac, Isembard, RMFG and Minerva, a US humanoid creator that gains from the FCC rule.)

Where the prosperity is#

Tesla solitary wants a myriad Optimus a year. Schaeffler counts 25 to 30 main-joint actuators in a humanoid, hands not included, so call it 25 myriad motors. The FCC regulation says 65% of a humanoid's parts by disbursal must be made in America. And the machines that create motors? Mostly imported.

• Make motors, not humanoids, which are still sold mostly to investigation labs. Robots, drones and e-bikes volition continually need motors, and motors barely alter from one generation to the next.
• Standardise akin Mabuchi. It offered customers a 20% discount in 1971 to obtain its norm motors, and today it makes concerning 1.4 milliard a year from concerning 90 essential designs.
• Build a stator row that can be quickly adapted to new sizes, since motor sizes motionless change.
• Don't build robots by hand in Ohio.

Hands win in China. Machines win in the West.

What I saw at BYD#

The next day I went to BYD, to a final-assembly plant two and a fractional hours east of Shenzhen. When BYD started making batteries in 1995, its founder, Wang Chuanfu, did Unitree's arithmetic, as CCTV tells it: an imported device disbursal $200,000, written off at RMB 20,000 a month, adequate to employ a dozen workers. "A individual affirmative a jig equals a robot," he told CCTV. Thirty years later, everything I saw was automated: robots welding the bodies, and completed cars rolling off the row and onto BYD's own ship.

Nothing exotic. The robots I saw were Fanuc and KUKA arms on pre-programmed paths, similar to what Tesla uses, alongside grippers bolted together out of aluminium extrusions complete of holes. Anyone can buy them, and nothing I saw is beyond an American plant, apart from the people. Fanuc sells the drills; BYD has the carpenters. BYD employs nearly as many group in R&D alone as Tesla has in total.

So what are all those engineers doing in a factory run by robots, and could an delegate do their job? That's part 2.

Braindump by Josef Chen