(Taiwan Chip Communications) Jensen Huang and Musk are also fascinated… “Explosive growth of humanoid robots”

Market size within the manufacturing industry: KRW 35 trillion by 2030
Expected to quadruple to 156 trillion won in 2035

Humanoid robots have emerged as a hot topic among global investors. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and TSMC Chairman Wei Zerza have repeatedly emphasized the importance of the industry, sparking investment. Immediately after Chairman Wei’s remarks, the stock price of Haiwin, Taiwan’s leading robot company, soared, exceeding NT$900 at one point.

According to the industry on the 11th, to welcome the new year, Gunik Securities privately held an ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robot and Smart Investment Technology Seminar’ under the theme of humanoid robots, which are attracting investment enthusiasm. Top industry experts attended this seminar and presented in-depth analysis and forecasts on AI and robot industry development trends and investment strategies.

Senior industrial researcher Chen Chang-rong said, “Humanoid robots are the most appropriate application of AI to the real world,” and added, “It is an important milestone in the robot industry’s development from ‘dedicated’ to ‘general purpose’ in specific fields such as factories.” Among manufacturing industries, there are many places where the working location and conditions do not change significantly and the work is simple. For this reason, humanoid robots are expected to be widely used initially in smart manufacturing fields such as automobiles and electronic products. Taiwan’s Industrial Economic Knowledge Center (IEK) predicted that humanoid robots are in their early stages but will grow explosively. The size of the doll robot market in the manufacturing industry is expected to increase four-fold from $23.7 billion (approximately 35 trillion won) in 2030 to $107.1 billion (approximately 156 trillion won) in 2035.

Jianwu Wang, manager of the China Innovative Technology ETF of China, also said, “Multi-functional robots will not only be used in various industries, but will also naturally permeate people’s daily lives beyond solving the labor shortage problem.” Investors can seize related opportunities by investing in major U.S. technology companies. Manager Wang said, “The current market environment is very similar to the time of the Internet revolution in 1995,” and “At that time, the Federal Reserve (Fed) preemptively cut interest rates to provide a soft landing for the economy, and since then, the U.S. stock market has recorded a cumulative increase of more than 500%. “We continued our long-term bull market,” he said.

Innovative technologies such as the Internet, search engines, smartphones, and AI applications have created a wide gap between U.S. technology stocks and other major markets in the roughly 10 years since their introduction. After the AI ​​craze that began in 2022, U.S. technology stocks are still in the early stages of rising and are expected to have a high potential for a long-term rise. Manager Wang said there is a positive correlation between research and development (R&D) investment and stock price performance, and cited Nvidia, Broadcom, and Palo Alto as examples. He said, “Both stock prices and R&D costs of these companies have increased significantly over the past five years,” and “This makes it an important criterion for investors to select companies with a high proportion of R&D.”

Major global companies are competitively expanding humanoid robot development and investment. Big tech companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI invested about $675 million (approximately 990 billion won) in robot company ‘Figure AI’ in February last year, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and OpenAI jointly invested in robot startup Physical Intelligence. It is known that it was done. OpenAI rebuilt its in-house robotics software development team earlier this year to develop humanoids.

Tesla plans to start selling the humanoid robot ‘Optimus’ next year. Chairman Wei also recently said, “I had a conversation with the world’s richest man a few days ago, and he said that the area we need to focus on in the future is multi-functional robots, not cars.” Chinese media reported that the person Chairman Wei met was CEO Musk. NVIDIA plans to launch a new small computer for humanoid robots called ‘Jetson Thor’ in the first half of this year. “The moment of ChatGPT for robots is approaching,” said Jensen Huang, who devoted most of his keynote speech at CES 2025, the world’s largest electronics and IT exhibition, to talking about cars and humanoid robots.

Taiwanese iPhone manufacturer Pegatron has established a new robotics division. Pegatron CEO Jeong Gwang-ji said, “We have deployed more than 100 research personnel in the robot sector,” and “we are in discussions with two major customers.” Chinese companies are also taking active steps. Wang Guangxi, vice president of Lenovo Group, said in a recent interview with a media outlet, “We have invested in more than 20 startups in the robotics field and plan to invest in two to three more in the future. Chinese manufacturers are rapidly strengthening their competitiveness in the mid- to low-end market.” did it Samsung Electronics also entered the race to develop humanoid robots in earnest by acquiring Rainbow Robotics, a robotics company that developed the bipedal robot ‘Hubo’. Samsung Electronics established a new ‘Future Robot Promotion Team’ directly under the CEO, and made a surprise announcement at CES 2025 that it plans to launch ‘Boli’, a companion robot designed with the goal of emotional connection, in the first half of this year.

Taiwan Economic Daily News = Reporters Liao Hsienlong and Huang Yahui/Translation = Asia Economy

※Please note that this column was published through a strategic partnership between Asia Economy and Taiwan’s Economic Daily News.

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