Robots and physical AI

NEURA Robotics introduced Neuron AI, a foundation model combining 3D vision, touch, hearing, robot state and language with memory. It runs across five robot form factors, with skills distributed through the Neuraverse platform. NEURA says its 4NE1 humanoid demonstrated an eleven-minute household workflow without human intervention at GTC Berlin, moving the announcement beyond a camera-only robotics model.

NEURA Robotics ↗ · October 14 briefing

Robotics and physical AI companies have raised about $48 billion so far in 2026, according to PitchBook data cited by the Financial Times. A growing share is going toward real-world video of people doing ordinary work, gathered in robot gyms and by placing cameras in homes, offices and factories. Labs including Physical Intelligence, Skild AI and NEURA Robotics mix outside vendors with in-house collection because such footage cannot be scraped from the web.

TechMeme ↗ · October 11 briefing · Follow the money

The US spends roughly $400 billion a year on long-term care, and for every 100 people over 65, only four formal caregivers are available. Humanoid robots such as Abi, built by Andromeda to provide emotional companionship for dementia patients, are an early attempt to close that gap. Andromeda COO Jennifer Haroon, Brookings researcher Gopi Goda, 1X chief designer Dar Sleeper, and Nvidia's Kimberly Powell debate whether robots can meaningfully help solve the elder care crisis or whether the technology still has too far to go.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · September 27 briefing

The corporate venture studio formerly known as UP Labs, now doing business as Vantora, raised $100 million to build startups for industrial corporations with a focus on physical AI. The firm partners with large manufacturers and industrial companies to spin up new ventures rather than investing in existing startups. Vantora is betting that physical AI, systems that sense and act in the real world, will be the next major wave of enterprise value creation.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · September 20 briefing · Follow the money

Nvidia's Les Karpas said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that general purpose robots are still waiting for their own ChatGPT moment because nobody has an internet scale dataset for physical AI the way language model developers did for text. He said the industry lacks the accumulated real world data that powered recent language model breakthroughs. Startups are trying to close that gap through simulation, synthetic data, and multi robot foundation models.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · September 16 briefing

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid robot built to work alongside factory workers without safety barriers, using actuators that let it squat lower and lift 50 pounds while sensing nearby people. The company touted $300 million in orders, but filings show the figure comes almost entirely from one customer buying 1,000 robots over three years, with units not arriving until 2027. Agility posted just $1.78 million in 2025 sales against a $140.2 million loss.

TechRepublic ↗ · September 16 briefing

Universal Robots, a Teradyne Robotics company and the original maker of collaborative industrial robots, unveiled its seventh generation cobot platform at the IMTS tradeshow in Chicago. Gen 7 introduces new robot arms, a fully reengineered controller and teach pendant, and updated software aimed at moving AI capabilities out of the lab and into everyday industrial operations. The launch reflects growing competition among robotics makers to pair physical hardware with AI software as manufacturers push for more autonomous factory floors.

Unite. AI ↗ · September 14 briefing

Mecka AI, a startup that pays people to record everyday tasks like making coffee using body sensors and smartphones, is nearing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of about 500 million dollars. The deal comes just three months after Mecka raised 60 million dollars in a round led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures. The company, founded in 2024, sells the motion data to train humanoid robots, following a data licensing model similar to Scale AI's approach for language models, and was projecting a 100 million dollar annual run rate by the end of 2026.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · September 13 briefing · Follow the money

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is launching a new Real World AI Stage focused on the intersection between digital and physical AI applications, featuring live demonstrations with Nvidia hardware, robotics companies, and even extinct animal reconstructions. The stage represents the conference's focus on moving AI from theory to practical, tangible applications in the real world. This reflects broader industry shift toward embodied AI and practical implementations beyond language models.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · September 2 briefing

Chinese robot manufacturers remain dependent on Nvidia's silicon and software stack despite geopolitical tensions, underscoring the chipmaker's dominance in the emerging physical AI market. Industry observers estimate Nvidia's physical-AI business now generates about $10 billion in annual revenue, extending the company's reach beyond data-center GPUs into robotics and autonomous systems. The reliance also illustrates how U. S. export controls and supply-chain politics are colliding with commercial demand in one of AI's fastest-growing frontiers.

TechMeme ↗ · August 30 briefing

Anthropic announced a new software standard that lets AI assistants like Claude control robots, lab instruments, and manufacturing hardware, opening a path for agents to operate directly in the physical world.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 27 briefing

Hugging Face unveiled MicroDuck, an open-source robot that can walk, talk, and roller-skate, while co-founder Thomas Wolf discussed surging demand for open robotics and declined to comment on reports of a roughly $13 billion Nvidia acquisition.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 27 briefing

Developers at the Actuate physical AI conference say robotics is stuck in a GPT-2 moment: hardware is advancing fast, but lack of training data and reliable reasoning means most humanoids are still far from real-world deployment.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · August 26 briefing

XPeng raised over $900 million for its humanoid robotics unit in China's largest embodied-AI funding round, valuing the division above $6.3 billion and targeting mass production of its Iron robot by year end.

AI Business ↗ · August 26 briefing · Follow the money

Waymo revealed a custom 5nm ASIC that processes sensor data from 13 cameras, four lidars, and radar, delivering more than 1,000 TOPS of ML compute for its next-generation robotaxi fleet.

TechRepublic ↗ · August 23 briefing

Unitree Robotics, formally Yushu Technology, soared as much as 629 percent on its Shanghai trading debut, rising from an IPO price of 150.8 yuan to as high as 1,100 yuan after raising 6.1 billion yuan, about $904 million. It is the first humanoid robot maker listed in mainland China, and the offering was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, a record for the STAR market. The Hangzhou company shipped over 5,500 humanoid robots last year and grew revenue to 1.7 billion yuan in 2025 from 393 million yuan, closing with a market value near 342 billion yuan.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 19 briefing

Venture funding for physical AI companies, covering robotics, autonomous machines and embodied systems, reached $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, according to Crunchbase News data. That is up 80 percent from the first half of 2025 and more than the $41.9 billion invested in the category across the whole of 2022 through 2024 combined. The figures suggest investors increasingly view physical AI as the next leg of the broader AI boom after the rush into models and data centers.

TechMeme ↗ · August 18 briefing · Follow the money

Sebastian Thrun, the founder of Google X and Waymo who is widely credited with kickstarting the modern self driving car, has come out of stealth with a new startup called Dulo. The company is building foundation models for hardware design, aiming to compress the physical engineering and manufacturing cycle the way code generation models have compressed software, under the tagline manufacturing at lightspeed. Dulo has assembled a team drawn from Waymo, Google Brain and the Stanford AI Lab, putting a well known name behind the push to apply frontier model techniques to robotics and industrial hardware.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · August 18 briefing

Fort Robotics, a Philadelphia based robotics safety startup backed by Mark Cuban, is going public through a SPAC deal valued at $500 million, with an expected Nasdaq listing under the ticker FROB. Chief executive Samuel Reeves said the company chose a SPAC over a traditional IPO for speed and efficiency, arguing it needed capital quickly to scale its technology, operations, go to market strategy and international expansion. The listing lands as venture money floods into physical AI and robotics, giving public investors a rare pure play on machine safety infrastructure.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · August 18 briefing

Gravis Robotics raised $200 million in a Series A led by SoftBank, billed as the largest Series A in construction robotics so far. The Zurich company, an ETH Zurich spinout founded in late 2022 by CEO Ryan Luke Johns and CTO Dominic Jud, does not build machines but retrofits contractor-owned excavators and earthmovers with a modular rack of cameras, lidar, satellite positioning and edge computing. Its learning-based control system blends machine hydraulics data with those sensors and adapts to different machines without being programmed for each one. Systems are already running in seven countries, including autonomous excavation at Manchester Airport and quarry work, with partners including Holcim, Taylor Woodrow, HD Hyundai and Flannery Plant Hire.

Unite. AI ↗ · August 17 briefing · Follow the money

Self described tech prankster Riley Walz coordinated 50 people to summon Waymo robotaxis to the same dead end San Francisco street at once, gridlocking the block and forcing the company to suspend service there until the following morning. The stunt worked as a crude denial of service attack, showing that the fleet had no defense against a coordinated surge of ride requests. California already requires autonomous vehicle operators to prove they can monitor, update and maintain fleets in line with federal vehicle cybersecurity guidance, yet the prank succeeded anyway, and neither Waymo nor the state DMV responded to requests for comment. Safety researchers argue cybersecurity should be treated as a primary vehicle safety system rather than an afterthought, noting that Arizona and Michigan have written it into their autonomous vehicle rules.

Fortune AI ↗ · August 13 briefing

Dyna Robotics unveiled DYNA-2, a robot foundation model trained on roughly one million hours of ordinary human video instead of teleoperated robot demonstrations, the expensive bottleneck that has capped how far robot foundation models can scale. Its world action model architecture learns spatial reasoning and contact physics from video generation objectives first, then fine tunes to a specific robot platform in hours rather than weeks. Dyna reports manufacturing task success rates climbing from about 20 percent to between 80 and 90 percent, roughly 1.55 times more tasks completed than its previous DYNA-1 model, and just 13 minutes of data needed to teach robot hands to open bottle caps.

Unite. AI ↗ · August 10 briefing

Amazon's Zoox will start charging for robotaxi rides in Las Vegas on August 10, its first commercial market after nearly a year of free public rides there and in San Francisco. The launch follows the first commercial exemption the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has granted to a purpose built robotaxi, which Zoox needed because its toaster shaped vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals. Fares combine a base charge with distance and time and are priced in line with the comfort tier of conventional ride hailing apps, with the final fee shown before booking and no extra charge if the vehicle takes a longer route.

CNBC Technology ↗ · August 5 briefing

NVIDIA released Alpamayo 2 Super, a 34 billion parameter reasoning model for autonomous driving, for commercial use. The weights are posted on Hugging Face under OpenMDW-1.1, the Linux Foundation's permissive license for AI model distributions, which permits fine tuning, derivative models and commercial redistribution. The move clears a licensing barrier that had confined earlier versions of the Alpamayo family to research, opening robotaxi development to commercial teams.

Unite. AI ↗ · August 4 briefing

Google DeepMind says the latest version of its Gemini Robotics model can control an entire humanoid robot's body. While the previous version focused on a robot's upper body, Gemini Robotics 2 now supports whole body motions ranging from the feet to the fingertips, according to a Thursday announcement. The update is aimed at enabling humanoid robots to perform more complex, coordinated physical tasks.

The Verge ↗ · July 30 briefing

Physical AI startup Generalist AI is in talks to raise a new funding round at a 3 billion dollar valuation, with venture firm 8VC expected to lead. The robotics company, founded by researcher Pete Florence to build general purpose intelligence for real world robots, would see its valuation climb from the 2 billion dollars it reached in a 400 million dollar round in June. The talks reflect a surge of investor money pouring into physical AI and robotics.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · July 29 briefing · Follow the money

Travis Kalanick's company Atoms, built on his earlier venture Cloud Kitchens and its acquisition of industrial automation firm Pronto, raised 1.7 billion dollars in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and Uber. Ben Horowitz is joining the Atoms board, and Uber's involvement reconnects Kalanick with the company he founded before being ousted as chief executive in 2017. Kalanick describes the effort as combining AI and robotics to modernize heavy industries like manufacturing and mining, calling it the bits to atoms story arc he started at Uber, and says the company plans to hire aggressively. Atoms had reportedly held earlier talks to acquire Pony AI's US operations, but those discussions ended in March.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · July 22 briefing · Follow the money

Google Cloud and Nvidia are teaming up with Munich based startup Microagi to accelerate development of AI robots that can understand and interact with their environments. Under the partnership, Microagi will gain access to Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs through Google Cloud's G4 virtual machines, as well as Nvidia GB300 NVL72 rack scale systems through A4X Max instances, to train and deploy models that process multimodal data. Microagi's Atlas platform fine tunes hardware agnostic AI models for robots in commercial and industrial settings using customers' operational data, and its technology is already used by robotics companies including Unitree and UBTECH. The deal follows Microagi's 55 million dollar seed round, the largest seed round in German history.

AI Business ↗ · July 22 briefing

Apple's canceled self-driving car effort, known as Project Titan, consumed more than a decade of work and over 10 billion dollars before being scrapped, but the neural processing work it produced became the foundation for Apple's AI chips. According to Mark Gurman, Apple is now preparing an M7 Ultra chip capable of supporting 1,536 gigabytes of unified memory for its first dedicated server hardware, expected around 2028. Apple is also pulling forward its M7 lineup and skipping higher end M6 chips to bring major AI processing gains to customers sooner.

The Verge ↗ · July 12 briefing · The compute buildout

Mistral has launched Robostral Navigate, a new hardware agnostic robotics navigation model, as the French startup expands into the emerging field of physical artificial intelligence. The model is trained entirely via simulation and needs only a single camera along with basic language prompts to guide a robot's movement, rather than relying on expensive specialized sensor rigs. The release positions Mistral to compete in the growing race among AI labs to bring foundation models into real world robotics applications.

TechMeme ↗ · July 8 briefing · The frontier model race

The startup, Proception, is taking a unique approach to collecting training data to tackle one of the hardest problems in robotics: hands.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · June 29 briefing

On Semiconductor said the deal bumps up its total addressable market by $30 billion to $243 billion by 2030.

CNBC Technology ↗ · June 25 briefing · The compute buildout

Agility Robotics aims to go public via a $2.5 billion SPAC merger, focusing on expanding its humanoid Digit robots.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · June 24 briefing · Follow the money

Nvidia's self-improvement program for robots uses teams of AI coding agents to autonomously direct robot training for datacenter tasks like GPU installation.

Ars Technica ↗ · June 17 briefing · The compute buildout · AI that writes code

In Shenzhen, workers at IO-AI Tech teleoperate humanoid robots through VR rigs, turning full-body imitation into one of the hottest jobs in China's hardware hub.

Wired ↗ · June 17 briefing · AI and work

Alibaba's Qwen team released RobotSuite: three embodied AI models covering manipulation (RobotManip), video world modeling (RobotWorld), and navigation (RobotNav) across multiple parameter sizes.

AI Research News ↗ · June 16 briefing

Researchers trained collaborative robots to read human emotions using visual language models that combine facial cues with broader contextual signals for safer human-robot teamwork.

IEEE Spectrum AI ↗ · June 14 briefing

Waymo is launching a subscription program that gives members priority pickup and other perks that are exclusive to its proprietary app.

Business Insider Tech ↗ · June 11 briefing

German humanoid robotics startup Neura Robotics raised up to $1.4 billion from Nvidia, Amazon, and other backers as investors pile into physical AI and embodied agents.

CNBC Technology ↗ · June 10 briefing · Follow the money

We introduce Humanoid-GPT, a GPT-style Transformer with causal attention trained on a billion-scale motion corpus for whole-body control. Unlike prior shallow MLP trackers constrained by scarce data and an agility-generalization trade-off, Humanoid-GPT is pre-trained on a 2B-frame retargeted corpus that unifies all major mocap datasets with large-scale in-house recordings. Scaling both data and model capacity yields a single generative Transformer that tracks highly dynamic behaviors while achie...

arXiv ↗ · June 3 briefing

Nvidia unveiled Cosmos 3, an open AI world model designed to help robots, autonomous vehicles and other physical systems better understand and predict real-world environments. Why it matters: Nvidia is continuing its move beyond chips into AI models and software, positioning itself to become a foundational platform for physical AI development. Driving the news: Nvidia says it trained Cosmos 3 on 20 trillion tokens of multimodal data, including nearly a billion images, 400 million real and syntheti...

Axios ↗ · June 1 briefing

PitchBook: VC investment in global robotics and physical AI jumped to $26B in 2025 from $4.2B in 2019, and has already topped $23B as of May 20 this year.

TechMeme ↗ · May 31 briefing

AI is coming for one of America's dirtiest jobs: changing tires. Why it matters: Demand for tire service is accelerating, in part because EV tires need more frequent replacement — just as service shops struggle to hire technicians. Changing tires is noisy, back-breaking work. And nobody wants to spend half their day waiting for a tire rotation. Automation is the answer, says Andy Chalofsky, a serial tire entrepreneur whose family has been in the tire business for four generations. Driving the news:...

Axios ↗ · May 15 briefing

Abhishek Vishnoi /Bloomberg:Analysis: Asian suppliers account for ~90% of Nvidia's production costs, up from 65% in 2025, as latest wave of collaborations shifts from chips to physical AI— The list of Asian stocks that benefit from business partnership with Nvidia Corp. is getting longer, as the region further integrates …

TechMeme ↗ · May 3 briefing · The compute buildout

Masayoshi Son plots IPO for business named Roze as soon as this year

Financial Times Tech ↗ · April 30 briefing

Tesla released its 2026 first-quarter financial earnings today, providing another look at the progress of Elon Musk's $1 trillion bet to transform his company into a leader of AI and robotics. Tesla said it earned $477 million in net income on $22.4 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended in April 2026. That's a […]

The Verge ↗ · April 22 briefing

Cailley LaPara /Bloomberg:Reliable Robotics, which is developing autonomous aircraft systems for cargo flights, raised $160 million in new funding — pushing its valuation to nearly $1 billion — as the Silicon Valley startup makes …

TechMeme ↗ · April 21 briefing · Follow the money

On Sunday morning in a Beijing suburb, a red, humanoid robot completed a half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, roughly seven minutes faster than the men's world record.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 20 briefing

Antioch raised an $8.5 million seed round to create simulation tools for a new generation of robot builders.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · April 16 briefing · AI that writes code

Skild AI, a fast-rising startup that makes software to help robots learn to complete tasks, has bought the robotics automation division of Zebra Technologies Corp., marking its latest effort to broaden its reach in a hot segment.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 15 briefing · Follow the money

Venture firm Eclipse has raised $1.3 billion across two funds to back companies building the next era of physical industries like those in robotics, manufacturing, and energy. Lior Susan, the founder and CEO of Eclipse, speaks with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech." (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · April 7 briefing · Follow the money

This National Robotics Week, NVIDIA is highlighting breakthroughs bringing AI into the physical world and robots transforming agriculture, manufacturing, energy, and other industries. Advancements in robot learning, simulation, and foundation models are accelerating development and helping systems move from training in simulation toward real deployment.

NVIDIA AI Blog ↗ · April 6 briefing

Kate Park /TechCrunch:Japan, driven by labor shortages, is increasingly adopting robotics and physical AI, with a hybrid model where startups innovate and corporations provide scale— Physical AI is emerging as one of the next major industrial battlegrounds, with Japan's push driven more by necessity than anything else.

TechMeme ↗ · April 6 briefing

Baidu Apollo Robotaxis froze in the middle of lanes, stranding passengers and causing crashes. What didn't Baidu learn from Waymo and what might we suspect about the cause?

Forbes Tech ↗ · April 5 briefing

Agile Robots will use DeepMind robotics foundation models and feed real-world data back to the lab.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · March 24 briefing

Bloomberg:Elon Musk announces Terafab, an Austin-based project run by Tesla and SpaceX to manufacture robotics, AI, and space data center chips for Tesla, xAI, and SpaceX— Elon Musk said his Terafab project — a grand plan to eventually manufacture his own chips for robotics, artificial intelligence …

TechMeme ↗ · March 22 briefing · The compute buildout

Gecko Robotics announced a $71 million partnership with the US Navy, deploying its AI-powered robots to assess the condition and readiness of American warships.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 17 briefing

AVs are important to Nvidia as self-driving cars remain one of the primary areas where the company can show growth outside of artificial intelligence.

CNBC Technology ↗ · March 16 briefing

Uber will let customers hail robotaxis from Amazon's Zoox, starting in Las Vegas this summer and expanding to Los Angeles next year. The partnership brings fully autonomous rides to the Uber app.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 11 briefing

Rhoda uses widely available internet video to train industrial robots for a variety of conditions. The AI robotics startup reached a $1.7 billion valuation in its latest funding round.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 10 briefing · Follow the money

ABB Robotics and NVIDIA announced a breakthrough partnership bringing industrial-grade physical AI to the factory floor. Integration with RobotStudio cuts deployment costs by up to 40% and dramatically reduces engineering time.

NVIDIA AI Blog ↗ · March 9 briefing

Amazon cut at least 100 white-collar jobs in its robotics division as it continues restructuring, even while expanding its warehouse robot fleet and AI spending. The move highlights the automation paradox in tech employment.

TechRepublic ↗ · March 9 briefing

Neura Robotics is building new robots on top of Qualcomm's IQ10 processors released at CES, signaling a broader push into AI-powered robotics with major chip suppliers.

TechCrunch ↗ · March 9 briefing

Hardware executive Caitlin Kalinowski resigned from her role leading OpenAI's robotics team, citing the company's controversial agreement with the Department of Defense. The move signals internal dissent over OpenAI's pivot toward military AI applications.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 8 briefing

German startup Neura Robotics is raising $1.2 billion in a round backed by stablecoin issuer Tether. The funding will accelerate the development of AI-powered humanoid robots for industrial and commercial use.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · March 4 briefing · Follow the money

AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s startup, World Labs, has raised $1 billion from a powerhouse group including NVIDIA, AMD, a16z, and Autodesk. The company aims to build large-scale 'world models' that enable AI to understand and interact with the physical 3D world for robotics and scientific discovery.

TechMeme ↗ · February 19 briefing · Follow the money

In a surprising retreat, Amazon has abruptly halted its 'Blue Jay' autonomous robotics project just six months after launch, signaling a potential shift in its strategy for last-mile delivery and physical AI.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · February 19 briefing

A new Barclays report projects that Physical AI—robotics and autonomous systems—will grow into a $1 trillion market by 2035, potentially overtaking the pure software AI market in total value.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 18 briefing

Apptronik raised $520M from Google and John Deere, tripling its valuation to over $5.5B to accelerate its humanoid robot deployment.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 11 briefing · Follow the money

Waymo is introducing the Waymo World Model, a frontier generative model built on top of Google DeepMind’s Genie 3, to produce photorealistic driving scenes at scale.

AI Research News ↗ · February 8 briefing · The frontier model race

Carbon Robotics' Large Plant Model will allow farmers to kill new types of weeds without having to retrain the machines.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · February 4 briefing

Defense tech startup Overland AI has raised $100 million in new funding to help accelerate the use of robots and other autonomous systems across the US military’s ground forces. Stephanie Bonk, president and co-founder of Overland AI, joins Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on “Bloomberg Tech.” (Video updated to correct Ascend. VC company logo on graphic.) (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 4 briefing · Follow the money

Connie Loizos /TechCrunch:Inside Physical Intelligence, a startup co-founded by Stripe veteran Lachy Groom that is building general-purpose robotics foundation models and has raised $1B+— From the street, the only indication I've found Physical Intelligence's headquarters in San Francisco is a pi symbol that's …

TechMeme ↗ · February 2 briefing · Follow the money

Waymo, Alphabet Inc.'s autonomous driving unit, is aiming to raise about $16 billion in a financing round that would value the unit at nearly $110 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · February 2 briefing · Follow the money

Canadian self-driving startup Waabi has raised $1 billion in financing with plans to expand from autonomous trucking to robotaxis with Uber. Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun joins Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow on “Bloomberg Tech.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 28 briefing · Follow the money

Designed to improve robots’ reasoning capabilities, Rho-alpha marks Microsoft’s offering in the growing field of physical AI.

AI Business ↗ · January 26 briefing · The frontier model race

Europe's industrial base sets it up well to lead in the physical AI space, Huang told WEF

CNBC Technology ↗ · January 21 briefing

Multi-tasking robots equipped with artificial intelligence will change the world. Mankind has to be ready to get the best out of them. How this is done will be decided in boardrooms and tech labs

Financial Times Tech ↗ · January 21 briefing

OpenAI faces cash crunch, Meta scales AI compute, robots learn worlds, Slackbot AI agent, Meta cuts metaverse jobs, Senate fast-tracks deepfake bill.

Forward Future ↗ · January 14 briefing

Skild AI, which is building general-purpose robotic software, just raised a $1.4 billion funding round led by SoftBank.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · January 14 briefing · Follow the money

Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics have announced a partnership to integrate Google's Gemini AI into Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot. The collaboration, revealed at CES 2026, aims to give Atlas the ability to perceive its environment, reason through problems, and manipulate unfamiliar objects.

Rowan Cheung ↗ · January 14 briefing

Gemini hits Hyundai, AI finds climber, Meta goes nuclear, DeepSeek coding, xAI builds plant, Anthropic joins Allianz, Dell pivot, DRAM up, MiniMax IPO, a16z funds.

Forward Future ↗ · January 12 briefing · The compute buildout

Jensen Huang took the stage at the CES trade show in Las Vegas this week to make the clearest pitch yet for Nvidia Corp.’s autonomous driving technology. In doing so, the chief executive officer’s vision for vehicles that can drive themselves edged into the terrain of major customers like Tesla Inc. and its boss, Elon Musk.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 11 briefing

Humanoid robot makers in China accounted for the vast majority of the roughly 13,000 units shipped globally last year, far outstripping US companies like Tesla Inc. and Figure AI in sheer volume, according to research firm Omdia.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · January 8 briefing

Will Knight /Wired:Boston Dynamics partners with Google DeepMind to integrate Gemini Robotics models into Atlas robots, boosting their object-manipulation capabilities and more— Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics are teaming up to integrate Gemini into a humanoid robot called Atlas.

TechMeme ↗ · January 5 briefing

Waymo is testing a Gemini-powered in-car AI assistant, per findings from a 1,200-line system prompt. The assistant can answer general knowledge questions, control certain in-cabin features, and more.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · December 26 briefing

China’s robot boom sparks bubble fears, U. S. AI work use rises, Gemini 3 Flash launches, OpenAI–Amazon talks, Coursera buys Udemy, Google challenges NVIDIA.

Forward Future ↗ · December 18 briefing

Alphabet's robotaxi venture plans to expand to dozens of cities, including London and New York

Financial Times Tech ↗ · December 17 briefing · Follow the money

Skana Robotics built a decision-making algorithm that helps unmanned vessels react and adapt to data from other vessels.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · December 17 briefing

After years of false promises and missed deadlines, several Tesla vehicles have been spotted over the weekend driving autonomously without safety monitors on public roads in Austin.

The Verge ↗ · December 15 briefing

The company has also developed AI models to power its Autonomy+ subscription, which it intends to roll out early next year for $2,500 upfront or $49.99 a month.

CNBC Technology ↗ · December 11 briefing · The compute buildout

Japan's SoftBank Group and Nvidia are in talks to invest in Skild AI, in a more than $1 billion funding round that would value the robotics foundation model startup at around $14 billion, up from $4.7 billion in July.

TechMeme ↗ · December 8 briefing · Follow the money

Researchers worldwide rely on open-source technologies as the foundation of their work. To equip the community with the latest advancements in digital and physical AI, NVIDIA is further expanding its collection of open AI models, datasets and tools — with potential applications in virtually every research field. At NeurIPS, one of the world's top AI conferences, NVIDIA announced major open-source AI developments.

NVIDIA AI Blog ↗ · December 1 briefing · Open models

China's top economic-planning agency has warned over the risk of a bubble forming in humanoid robotics, in a rare official expression of concern about the booming sector.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 27 briefing

Pony AI Inc. shares rose for a third day in Hong Kong trading, arresting a steep decline since listing three weeks ago, after the robotaxi firm said its Guangzhou operations had broken even on a per-car basis in an early indication its business model is sustainable.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 26 briefing

Global tech executives in recent weeks have proclaimed the robotaxi industry is finally near an inflection point.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 20 briefing

DeepMind's chief says he envisions Gemini as an operating system for physical robots. The company has hired Aaron Saunders to help make that a reality.

Wired ↗ · November 20 briefing

Physical Intelligence, a startup developing artificial intelligence software to help robots learn a wide range of tasks, has raised $600 million in a new round of funding that values the company at $5.6 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Alphabet Inc.’s independent growth fund CapitalG led the round, with participation from existing investors Lux Capital, Thrive Capital and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing priva

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 20 briefing · Follow the money

Bone AI, a South Korean startup, is combining AI and manufacturing to build next-gen defense robotics and challenge the region’s industry giants.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · November 18 briefing · Follow the money

Anthropic believes AI models will increasingly reach into the physical world. To understand where things are headed, it asked Claude to program a quadruped.

Wired ↗ · November 12 briefing

Tesla CEO Elon Musk he needs a "gigantic" semiconductor fabrication plant to meet the company's chip needs as it expands its AI and robotics ventures.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 9 briefing · The compute buildout

Physical AI where robotics and AI collide to get real-world work done. Amazon and Nvidia are backing AI-driven robotics companies in a new Fellowship with MassRobotics.

Forbes Tech ↗ · November 6 briefing

Both chains will look to install the Infinite Kitchen machines in more locations.

Bloomberg Technology ↗ · November 6 briefing

Chinese electric car company Xpeng is following in Tesla's footsteps by moving into robotaxis and humanoid robots.

CNBC Technology ↗ · November 5 briefing · The compute buildout

Mbodi users prompt the software with natural language, and its cluster of AI agents works to make training easier.

TechCrunch AI ↗ · October 29 briefing

DeepMind researchers believe this is the dawn of agentic robots.

Ars Technica ↗ · September 25 briefing