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Robotics

The Robotics Value Report — robot pricing, depreciation, resale value, and RaaS economics across the market.

Robots Have No Unit of Work. That's Where '10x Productivity' Lives.

Compute has a unit of work — the token, the FLOP — so any two chips or models can be compared on it. Robots don't. Physical work doesn't tokenize, no standards body has ever built an economic unit-of-work metric for robots, and three incompatible measures circulate in the vacuum. Vendors pick whichever flatters: from two named vendors, four 'productivity' multiples with no metric named at all — while the same pages name a concrete unit, pick rates, exactly when the number is flattering. One vendor even pegs a subscription fee to 'productivity,' a word its own page never defines.

Three Robot Programs Made the News This Quarter. None Made the Index.

A production count of zero heading into Tesla's Q2-2026 earnings call. A $152 million Series A for a London startup named Humanoid, with Bosch on manufacturing. Four new models from AGIBOT at WAIC, aimed at export. What none of the three has: a shipping unit with an observed price. In our ledger, that is the only line that counts — and it is still blank for all three.

100,000 Humanoids in 2026, or 40,000? Both Numbers Are in the Same Sentence.

The '100,000 humanoids in 2026' figure travels as if it were a shipment count. It is a forecast — and in the very report where it appears, a Deutsche Bank analyst puts her own expectation at roughly 40,000. Two production forecasts for one year, sixty thousand units apart, in a single sentence. We price neither. We price shipped machines at observed prices, and by that count 2026 is still blank.

The Used-Robot Market Isn't a Black Box. It's Split by Who's Selling.

Used industrial arms are usually described as uniformly opaque — call for a quote, no prices anywhere. Against the receipts that's wrong. Where one broker controls the listing, 100% of prices are gated behind a phone call. On an open marketplace of independent sellers, 40% of sampled listings carry a real dollar asking price — one Fanuc arm at $19,999, another at $99,000, a delta robot at $9,000. Opacity isn't a property of used robots. It's a property of the selling structure.

The Chinese-Robot Ban Isn't a Proposal. As of July 28, It's on the Books.

The reporting says the administration is 'considering' restrictions on Chinese-made robots. Against the receipts, that framing is already out of date. On 2026-07-28 the FCC added 'advanced robotic devices' to its Covered List — new humanoid and quadruped models are now barred from U.S. import and sale authorization. It is the same instrument the Commission used against DJI drones seven months earlier, the fourth China-driven hardware action in this shape in 13 months. The rule never says 'China.' It doesn't have to.

We Read Five Years of Robot Manufacturer Websites. We Found Zero Prices.

Sixty archived snapshots of six major robot makers' public pages, July 2021 through July 2026. Number of U.S. dollar prices published in that entire span: zero. Robot pricing isn't discreet — it's structurally opaque, and everyone in the market pays for it.

The Closest Preview of Robot Depreciation Is the Used-GPU Market. It Doesn't Decay Smoothly.

Robots are a fast-frontier asset with almost no public resale prices. The nearest asset that does have them — used data-center GPUs — shows depreciation that plateaus for over a year, then cliffs when a later generation frees up supply, and can even sit above list price under scarcity. Anyone financing a robot on a smooth-decay assumption should look at these receipts first.

Introducing the Robot Frontier Price Index: What Robots Actually Cost, On the Record

The Robot Ledger launches with a simple question nobody can currently answer from public data: what does it cost to buy into robotics today? Print #001 covers humanoids, quadrupeds, and autonomous tractors — every figure traced to an archived, dated source.

The $20,000 Question: What Humanoid 'Purchase' Options Actually Mean for Credit

1X now sells its home humanoid as a $499/month lease or a $20,000 purchase, echoing solar's early RaaS-to-loan arc -- but Agility Robotics' SPAC filings show why humanoid 'ownership' still isn't backed by underwritable credit, just manufacturer balance sheets.

The Underwriting Threshold: Why Industrial Robots Now Count as 'Financeable Assets' — Even as U.S. Volume Is Still Catching Up

Equipment lessors now classify robotics as standard financeable industrial capex, with shortening refresh cycles reshaping underwriting terms — even as U.S. installation volume only just returned to double-digit growth after years of decline.

How Long Does an Industrial Robot Last? What Tax Authorities, Auditors, and the Used Market Actually Say

A lender setting a term on a robot loan needs a defensible useful life. Here's every authoritative answer we could find — from the IRS's 7-year default to Australia's explicit 10-year determination to the 4-year life one robotics company uses in its audited financials — and why they differ.

The Warning in the Fine Print: Equipment Credit Is Deteriorating Vintage by Vintage — and the Aggregates Haven't Caught Up

We parsed 3,351 monthly servicer reports from two captive equipment-ABS shelves, 2006–2026. Loans originated in 2023–24 are running multiples of the losses of the 2020–21 vintages at the same age — while headline bank delinquency data still reads benign.

The 38,000-Unit Question: What US Robot Growth Means for Underwriters

US industrial robot installations jumped 11% in 2025, pushing a maturing asset class further into standard equipment-finance territory — even as most buyers still default to subscription-style RaaS over outright purchase.