Edition #7: The Robots Shipped Before the Power Did
This year robots started coming off real production lines. Powering them through a full day is the part nobody solved.
The Signal
For years, the robot that could do real work was always a year away. A clip on a stage. A promise for next year. This year it started coming off a production line.
The most visible ones are shaped like us. Figure, a US robotics company, now builds one of its Figure 03 robots every hour at its California factory, up from one a day in January. 1X started full production of its home robot NEO, with room for 10,000 units a year and a plan for 100,000 by the end of 2027. Boston Dynamics is shipping its Atlas. Agility’s Digit already works, on paid contracts, inside warehouses for Amazon and a Toyota plant in Canada. The hard part everyone said was decades away, building these at scale, got solved fast.
So the wall moves to what comes after the factory: keeping the thing working.
Here is the part that stays out of the launch videos. Most of these machines run on a battery, and under real work that battery does not last a full shift. Agility keeps Digit going by sending it back to a dock to recharge itself. Apptronik’s robot swaps its batteries out. Figure’s charges through its feet. Tesla says its robot can go a full day, a claim the industry is still waiting to see hold up under real load. Every serious builder has the same quiet answer to the same quiet problem. The machine has to stop and get charged, and someone has to design how.
And none of this is about the human shape. A warehouse robot on wheels, a delivery bot, a piece of equipment out in a field, if it runs on a battery, it hits the same wall. The form changes. The constraint does not.
I know this wall from the other side. I am building something physical right now where the battery decides whether it works. Everything clever sits downstream of that one constraint.
We have watched this shape before, one layer up. The AI data center story stopped being about chips a while ago. It became a story about power, about who could get enough electricity to the building. Robots are repeating that move. The next scarce thing is the energy to keep them moving, and the cost of keeping a fleet of them charged.
That is a convergence almost nobody is pricing. Robots and energy are becoming the same problem. A company that ships 10,000 robots a year has built a manufacturing business. Whoever works out how to power and charge 10,000 robots through real working hours has built the business the first one runs on.
The robots are real now. Watch where they plug in.
The Application
Figure. A US robotics company. At its California factory, production of the Figure 03 robot went from one a day in January to one an hour by late April, more than 350 built so far, on the way to 12,000 a year. Forty are working at a BMW plant in South Carolina.
1X. Its California factory began full production of NEO, a home robot, on April 30, with capacity for 10,000 a year and a plan for 100,000 by the end of 2027. It costs $20,000, or $499 a month. The first year of production sold out in five days. First home deliveries are due in 2026, though early demos still ran on a person controlling the robot from a distance.
Agility Robotics. Its robot Digit has the real, named customers: Amazon, the logistics firm GXO, and a Toyota plant in Ontario, Canada, which pay for it by the hour rather than buying it. Digit gets through a shift by parking itself to recharge. The working day is built around the charger, not the robot.
Boston Dynamics. Its Atlas robot has started shipping. All of its 2026 production is already committed to Hyundai and Google’s DeepMind lab, for testing and data, not open sale.
The Noise: “Robots are about to take the jobs.”
Every production milestone this year gets read as a countdown to mass replacement. It makes a good headline and a worse forecast. The robots shipping today do narrow, repetitive work, and they still hand the hard part back to a person. In 1X’s own demo, a human wearing a headset drove the robot through every task. They also stop to charge or swap batteries before a person would take a first break. What arrives in 2026 is a small number of machines doing a few dull jobs under supervision, plugged in for a real part of the day. The replacement story sells conference tickets. The charging schedule is what shows up in the pilot report.
The Question
Take any automation you are being sold that runs on a battery: a robot on your warehouse floor, a machine out in the field, a delivery unit. Ask the seller for the number they leave off the slide, how many hours of real work it does on one charge under your actual load, plus the time it spends charging and the power it draws to keep going as long as you need. Where the math only works with the number on the brochure, you are being sold the demo, not the shift.
Now What?
Before you sign any robot or battery-powered automation pilot, put the real numbers in the contract, not the demo: hours of work per charge under your actual load, charging time, and how much power a full fleet pulls. Make the seller commit to those.
Price the energy, not just the robot. Machines that park to charge or swap batteries change your floor layout and your electricity bill. That cost belongs in the business case on day one.
In any board conversation, separate “you can buy it” from “it works your hours.” A robot in production is not yet a robot doing your shift.
If you build a physical product that runs on a battery, treat the battery and the charging as the thing that decides everything else. It usually is.
Watch who moves into powering and charging robots at scale. In computing, the lasting profit went to whoever controlled the electricity. That ground is open here, and mostly empty.
What I’m Watching
Health. On June 9, Life Biosciences gave the first human dose of a therapy that partly resets cells to a younger state. First time this approach to reversing aging, long the most serious bet in longevity science, has been tried in a living person under an FDA trial.
Quantum. JPMorgan, quantum firm OQC, and chipmaker AMD opened a shared quantum computing center in London, with the bank as its first dedicated user. A major bank paying for its own access is a different signal than another lab demo.
Energy. Fervo Energy raised USD 1.89 billion in its stock market debut to build next-generation geothermal power, with Google as its anchor customer for a large block of clean, around-the-clock electricity. Same energy-for-computing pressure now starting to shape robots.
This is my newsletter. Emerging technology without the hype. Real signals for strategic decisions.
Javier D’Ovidio
Exponential Technologist