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US Robotics Race Hits Chinese Hardware Bottleneck
Physical Intelligence's Sergey Levine told The Peterman Pod that US robotics depends on Chinese hardware. A June McKinsey analysis found China holds 90% of permanent-magnet processing.
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The brains may come from Silicon Valley, but the bodies still cross the Pacific.
Sergey Levine, a researcher at the San Francisco-based startup Physical Intelligence, said the US robotics industry has its own advantages against foreign competition. The gap is hardware supply. Levine said on The Peterman Pod, published Monday, that reliable low-cost components are a big deal – and a lot of what the research community uses comes from China.
"It's good. It's relatively inexpensive. It's of high quality and meets the standards that people generally need," Levine said. "But it'd be awfully nice to be able to source all of that domestically as well. I don't think there's anything impossible about that."
Physical Intelligence builds the software models that run warehouse and humanoid robots. Levine said the full robotics ecosystem needs every link to be healthy: motor makers, sensor fabricators, battery plants. "I think that it's important to sort of fully embrace that this is a holistic thing and not something where we can do just one piece of it and outsource everything else," he said.