In the global race for humanoid robotics leadership, the decisive factor may be less about artificial intelligence and more about the hardware that enables robots to move.

That is the conclusion of a new study released Wednesday by San Francisco-based robotics AI vendor OpenMind, which assessed the infrastructure needed to build and deploy advanced embodied AI across 58 countries and 22 metropolitan clusters.

The study was partly prompted by the FCC’s recent barring of foreign-made robotics components from the U.S., a move widely seen as targeting Chinese manufacturers and reinforcing domestic supply chains. That has raised a broader question: can the U.S. build a robotics ecosystem without China, and what would it take? OpenMind’s report sets out to answer that question.

OpenMind CEO Jan Liphardt said China has already secured the hardest-to-reverse parts of the race, supported by decades of manufacturing capability and investment that allowed the country to lock in supply chains ahead of much of the robotics industry.

“Physical AI is not gate-limited by AI. It's gate-limited by all the apparently simple stuff, such as the actuators, the magnets, the chips, the arms and the legs,” Liphardt told AI Business. “And it turns out that China is ahead of everyone else, not just by a tiny little bit, but significantly ahead.”

China scored 82.9 on OpenMind’s Physical AI Readiness Index, compared with 69.6 for Japan and 69.0 for the U.S. The researchers attributed the gap primarily to China’s progress in energy, robotics and materials, along with years of sustained national investment.

“China has been putting large resources into automation and advanced robotics for a long time,” Liphardt said. “There's no magic or mystery here. China has very publicly chosen advanced robots as a national priority, and they have been putting resources against that decision for the last 15 years. Other countries, for example, the U.S., have been offshoring manufacturing for years. The gap you're seeing right now in capability really reflects decades of prior decisions.”

China’s ecosystem advantage

The report argues that the main constraint on humanoid production is mechanical. Actuators make up 40% to 60% of a humanoid robot’s bill of materials. Without Chinese suppliers, OpenMind said humanoid costs would more than double, rising from $46,000 to $131,000.

China also manufactures an estimated 94% of the world’s sintered rare-earth permanent magnets, which OpenMind identifies as the tightest supply-chain constraint for humanoid production. For manufacturers trying to move beyond prototype robots and into repeatable production, that kind of component concentration shapes both cost and timing, especially because humanoids depend on a stack of physical parts that must be available at scale before software can be deployed broadly.

“One thing that the U.S. has struggled with is articulating a durable strategy for securing the supply chain,” Liphardt said. “What's needed there is a decades-long focus on securing parts of the physical supply chain.”

Linda Sui, founder and principal of Smart Analytics Global, said China’s supply chain strength comes in large part from its established and regulated ecosystem.

“China's advantage does not come from leadership in one or two components, but from the concentration of motors, actuators, precision components, electronics suppliers, manufacturing capacity and robot OEMs within a highly integrated ecosystem,” she said. “Rebuilding that combination of supplier density, engineering expertise, scale and cost competitiveness elsewhere would require significant investment and time.”

Can the U.S. catch up?

Sui cautioned against treating China’s lead as permanent or absolute across every layer of the supply chain.

“This advantage should not be viewed as impossible to challenge or permanent,” she said. “U.S., European, Japanese and Korean suppliers continue to hold strong positions in areas such as AI compute, advanced semiconductors, high-end sensing and precision reducers.”

“Over time, we expect the humanoid supply chain to remain globally interconnected, even as China retains a significant manufacturing and cost advantage,” she added.

OpenMind identified several ways the gap could narrow, including successful non-Chinese magnet production and Western humanoid manufacturers moving from pilot production to mass manufacturing.

Marco Wang, analyst at Interact Analysis, said European and American companies still have room to build competitive ecosystems.

“The industry and the technology are still in their early stages, and at this point it is difficult to quantify the market competitiveness of humanoid robot companies across different regions,” he said. “In my view, European and American companies still have a strong opportunity to build competitive humanoid robot ecosystems.”

He added that partnering with Chinese companies remains an important route to scaling cost-effective hardware, while European and American companies can also raise engineering standards and use product performance to win market opportunities.

Liphardt said the issue is one each country must decide for itself.

“What's important now is for countries to decide and articulate the extent to which they want to be able to make things themselves,” he said. “There's no right or wrong answer, but it’s important for the ability to manufacture things not to be concentrated in any one place or country.”

“Globally, we're at an incredible technical blossoming, and what's missing is the parallel political discussion about how we want to use all of these amazing new things,” he added.