Hello Panasonic, Telsa cuts Optimus' memory budget, and Munich takes center stage

Panasonic is going to make humanoid robots

Remember your old Panasonic TV? Toaster? Radio? 

Now you're going to be able to get a brand-new Panasonic Humanoid Robot™ ... well, name TBD. Except it won't be for your house, at least initially/

The century-old Japanese electronics giant says it plans to start producing humanoids by 2029, initially for factories and warehouses. A new AI and robotics R&D division will lead development, and Panasonic thinks one of its advantages could be something it already knows extremely well: batteries.

It’s one of the giant legacy electronics companies that helped define the last several generations of consumer technology. And now it sees robots as part of the next one.

We’re starting to see a pattern here.

At CES in January, LG unveiled CLOiD, its home robot with two arms, five-fingered hands and a wheeled base. LG showed it doing laundry, folding clothes and working with appliances in the kitchen. LG is also developing its own robot actuators.

So two enormous Asian consumer electronics companies are now building physical AI systems that can actually manipulate the world.

And the advantage for companies like Panasonic and LG is obvious: they already know how to build complex hardware at scale. They have supply chains, factories, motors, batteries, sensors, appliances and decades of manufacturing experience.

The big question is whether they can add the intelligence quickly enough to compete with companies that started with AI and robotics from day one. But ... like an Apptronik or a Agility Robotics, they could partner with Google on physical AI with Gemini Robotics ... 

Tesla trims Optimus memory to scale production

Tesla is already running into one of those scaling problems.

Elon Musk says Tesla cut the planned RAM in its AI5 and AI6 chips because there simply wasn’t enough memory available at the volumes Optimus will require. AI5 was initially cut all the way to 72 gigabytes before Musk bumped it back up to 96. AI6 is staying at 144 gigabytes.

Musk says bandwidth matters more than total memory and expects essentially no performance penalty. But Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says humanoid robots could eventually require more than 200 gigabytes of memory each, plus multiple terabytes of storage.

(Ouch.)

So this is an interesting early warning about humanoid scale. If companies really intend to build robots by the hundreds of thousands — or millions — they’re not just going to need motors, gearboxes and batteries.

They’re going to need an enormous amount of compute and memory too.

And guess what ... the data centers are already making all of that stuff expensive. Picks & shovels for one revolution, meet revolution #2.

US VCs tour China’s robot factories

And American investors increasingly want to see China’s robotics advantage for themselves. (We've seen this before. Now there's a new wave.)

Business Insider reports that Silicon Valley VCs are joining private trips to Chinese robot factories, with some organized tours costing as much as $10,000 per person.

They’re not primarily looking for Chinese investments.

They’re checking out the competition facing the American companies they’ve already funded.

And what they’re seeing is scale.

Omdia says Unitree and AgiBot together shipped 71% of the world’s humanoid robots last year, while separate research suggests China controls 63% of the key companies in the humanoid component supply chain.

One investor came away saying the message he wanted other American VCs to understand was basically: this is what serious looks like. This is a very different dynamic from investors flying to China looking for cheap manufacturing.

Now they’re going there for competitive intelligence.

Munich gets another robotics unicorn

Meanwhile, Munich’s robotics ecosystem just got another billion-dollar company.

RobCo has crossed a $1 billion valuation following a secondary share transaction reportedly worth about $40 million. The company came out of the Technical University of Munich and builds autonomous industrial robots. Its next machine, Alfie, is a two-armed self-learning robot designed for jobs that are too variable for traditional automation.

RobCo says the US is now its fastest-growing market, and CEO Roman Hölzl has moved there to help drive expansion.

But the company’s roots matter.

Munich is becoming one of Europe’s most interesting physical AI clusters. Agile Robots is there. Franka Robotics is now part of Agile Robots. And now RobCo has joined the billion-dollar club.

Silicon Valley has AI. Shenzhen has hardware. Munich increasingly has both robotics engineering and industrial customers right next door.

Hitachi teams up with Agile Robots

And Agile Robots -- also based in Munich -- has another major industrial partner.

Hitachi and Agile Robots have signed a deal to develop physical AI for manufacturing. Hitachi brings more than a century of industrial and operational technology experience. Agile brings robot arms, mobile robots, its Agile ONE humanoid and its AgileCore software stack.

The ambition goes beyond putting one smarter robot on a production line.

They want systems where robots can perceive changing factory conditions, make decisions and adapt instead of blindly repeating a preprogrammed sequence.

That’s another legacy industrial giant making a serious move into physical AI.

And it reinforces the Panasonic story: some of the biggest competitors in robotics over the next decade may be companies that aren’t primarily considered robotics companies today.

Number of the day: 250,000

250,000.

That’s approximately how many professional service robots shipped worldwide in 2025, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

• Shipments jumped 24% in just one year.
• Transportation and logistics alone accounted for about 117,500 robots.

And here’s the interesting comparison.

The IFR says only about 7,000 full-size humanoid robots — defined here as taller than 140 centimeters — were sold globally in 2025 for commercial and professional applications.

So humanoids are still tiny compared with the broader robotics market, at least according to this definition. But the infrastructure, investment and customer appetite for robots in the real world are already much larger.

250,000 robots in a year says physical AI doesn’t have to wait for humanoids to arrive.

It’s already happening.

Sources

• Panasonic: Nikkei Asia — Panasonic to make humanoid robots, leveraging its battery business

• LG context: LG — CLOiD home robot at CES 2026

• Tesla and Micron: Benzinga — Tesla cuts Optimus memory to scale production

• China factory tours: Business Insider — American investors tour China’s robot factories

• RobCo: Reuters — RobCo hits $1 billion valuation

• Hitachi and Agile Robots: Agile Robots — Physical AI partnership for manufacturing

• Number of the day: International Federation of Robotics — Global service robot sales surge 24%