One of the research houses tracking the humanoid robot industry has sharply revised its own numbers, and the size of the revision is eye-watering.
Grand View Research (GVR) has published an updated edition of its humanoid robot report, putting the global market at US$40.5-billion by 2033 and growing at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 38.2% between 2026 and 2033.
The previous edition, still live on GVR’s website put the market at $1.55-billion in 2024, rising to $4.04-billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 17.5%.
Work back from the new forecast at the stated growth rate and you get a 2026 market of about $4.2-billion, roughly double the earlier edition’s implied figure for the same year, and about $15.3-billion by 2030. That is close to four times what the earlier edition projected for 2030.
Some of the gap comes down to methodology rather than a change of heart. But the revision is too big to write off as housekeeping and points to a clear ramp-up of investment and expected humanoid robot production.
The most telling shift is in what the analysts now think these machines are for. In the earlier edition, the “wheel-drive” segment held the largest share of the market, at 65.6% in 2024, and GVR expected it to stay the fastest-growing category. The application leader was personal assistance and caregiving, on 31.6%.
Flipped
Both have since flipped. The biped segment now accounts for the largest share, which GVR attributes to “the increasing adoption of autonomous mobile humanoid robots and last-mile delivery applications”. Manufacturing has taken over as the largest application, driven by “the increasing need for automation in repetitive, precision-based and hazardous industrial tasks such as assembly, inspection, welding support and material handling”.
The market GVR described two years ago was largely wheeled robots greeting people in hotel lobbies and helping out in care homes. The market it describes now is legged machines working in factories and warehouses.
Read: Humanoid robots are now faster than the world’s best runners
Just how far bipedal control has come was on show in Shenzhen last week, where two EngineAI T800s fought in a hexagonal cage at the opening bout of the Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend, billed as the first mixed martial arts event of its kind. They traded kicks until one lost its head and kept fighting without it. Martial arts actor Donnie Yen, watching ringside, called the robots’ “sheer power and precision movements” incredible.
Hardware’s share of the market has grown, too, from 69.7% in 2024 to more than 79.4% in 2025, which GVR puts down to demand for sensors, actuators, robotic mobility systems, AI processors and power management components.
GVR has rebuilt its list of the companies that matter around the same shift. The older edition named 10 firms, among them Hyulim Robot, Sanbot and Willow Garage – a robotics lab that closed its doors in 2014. The new one lists 30. Five of the original names survive, including Honda and Engineered Arts, but the additions are the ones drawing capital today: Tesla, Figure AI, Nvidia, Samsung, Xiaomi, XPeng, Unitree, Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics. TechCentral has previously reported on XPeng’s move into humanoids with its Iron robot.
Expectations
Tesla CEO Elon Musk went to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, his first appearance at an event he had spent years attacking, and told BlackRock CEO and WEF co-chair Larry Fink that robotics and AI were “the path to abundance for all”.
“My prediction is there will be more robots than people,” Musk said, adding that humanoid robots could help provide elderly care in a world without enough young people to look after older citizens.
He also put a date on it, saying Tesla’s Optimus robots would be performing “simple tasks” in factories by the end of this year, and that “probably by the end of next year, I think we’ll be selling humanoid robots to the public”.
Read: How Beijing’s army of robot dogs and AI drones could redefine warfare
Musk is not a disinterested observer. Tesla appears on GVR’s new list of key players and was absent from the old one, and Optimus is central to the company’s pitch to investors. He has made versions of the same prediction before, telling the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia in October 2024 that “by 2040, there will probably be more humanoid robots than there are people”, which would mean upwards of 10 billion machines.
That forecast drew scepticism from within the field. Angelo Cangelosi, professor of machine learning and robotics at the University of Manchester, called it “definitely not realistic”, telling Newsweek that while robots would handle complex work, “they will only be specialised in a subset of tasks. Not at all humanlike.” He also cautioned that demonstration videos rarely show the failed attempts behind each successful one.
Musk has acknowledged the looseness of his own timelines. “When I make a prediction, I try to say, ‘What is the fiftieth percentile likely,’ which means that half the time I should be wrong,” he said at the 2024 event.
Barclays analysts, for comparison, put the humanoid robotics market at $2-billion to $3-billion today and expect at least $40-billion by 2035, possibly as much as $200-billion. GVR gets to a similar number two years earlier, which puts it at the bullish end of mainstream estimates without making it an outlier.
South Africa
South Africa is one of just three countries GVR tracks individually in the Middle East and Africa, alongside Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The report does not break out a South African figure publicly, and the MEA region does not feature in any of the published highlights.
North America remains the largest regional market, but its dominance has thinned in GVR’s own forecasting, from a 52.2% revenue share in 2024 to “over 43.4%” in 2025.
Read: ‘The robot will see you now’: OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health
If the machines being built are aimed at assembly lines and warehouses rather than reception desks, the automation question moves closer to sectors that employ large numbers of South Africans. TechCentral has examined the risk that AI-driven automation hits retail, logistics and basic manufacturing hardest, and reported on China’s plans to embed humanoid machines in its industrial strategy, with South Africa among the intended partners. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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