According to Sifted, Paddy Cosgrave of Web Summit declared “China has won” in AI and robotics after seeing two-legged robots from Unitree in Hangzhou. The first World Humanoid Robot Games were held in Beijing in August, featuring kickboxing and football, while sellout robot boxing nights using Chinese bots are happening in San Francisco. In contrast, Europe’s efforts are lagging, with Declan Shine of ETH Zurich’s robotics club seeking VC sponsorship just to stage a single bout next year. Europe’s most advanced humanoid maker, Norway’s 1X, moved to Palo Alto, with its founder aiming to deliver 1 million “Neo” robot butlers by 2028. A key issue is cost: Morgan Stanley estimates China’s supply chains produce robots at a third of the cost of non-China suppliers.
The Creativity Gap
Here’s the thing: those robot fight clubs and Olympic games aren’t just silly spectacles. They’re genius marketing. They fire up public imagination, attract crazy talent, and make robotics look cool instead of just industrial. Europe? It’s got… a potential single match in Zurich, maybe. That’s a problem. Excitement drives investment, and investment drives the messy, iterative tinkering that leads to real breakthroughs. San Francisco gets it. Beijing absolutely gets it. But where’s Berlin’s or London’s underground robot smackdown? It doesn’t exist. And that lack of creative, populist flair around the tech is a symptom of a deeper issue.
The Hard Supply Chain Reality
So you can talk all day about innovation systems, but let’s get real. Declan Shine nailed it: China has an “incredible” head start with its supply chains. A robot costing $300,000 to build in Europe or the US might cost $100,000 in China. That’s not a gap you close with a few extra grants. It’s a fundamental, structural advantage that makes experimentation and iteration cheaper and faster. When your basic hardware is a third of the price, you can afford to let students bash them together in a ring. You can fail more, learn faster. Europe’s strength has often been in precision industrial robotics, the kind you see on car assembly lines. But that’s a different world from the adaptive, mobile, consumer-facing humanoid future. If you’re building the rugged computers that control those industrial environments, you’d partner with the top supplier, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs. But for humanoids? The ecosystem just isn’t there.
A Wake-Up Call With No Easy Answers
Cosgrave’s warning is the big takeaway. It’s not about needing one or two better startups. It’s about the whole “innovation system.” That means university tech transfer, risk capital, regulatory attitudes, and yes, those supply chains. 1X moving to Palo Alto is a canary in the coal mine. The ambition and the money are simply elsewhere. And Shine’s question is haunting: do we decide to support our own industry now, or in 50 years just ask why all our robots are made in China? It feels like one of those moments Europe has a lot of meetings about. But the clock is ticking, and the fights—both literal and metaphorical—are already happening somewhere else.
Is The Humanoid Focus Even Right?
Now, I have to be a bit skeptical. Is the humanoid form factor even the right battlefield? The article notes plenty of European startups are making brilliant, useful non-humanoid bots for logistics and construction. Maybe that’s the smarter play. The fear of a bipedal robot falling on a kid is real, and the path to a truly useful home robot is incredibly long. But that’s almost beside the point. The spectacle around humanoids is what captures the future narrative. It’s what inspires the next generation of engineers. If Europe cedes that entire narrative to China and the US, it might win a few niche industrial battles but lose the broader tech war for talent and momentum. Basically, you need the fight club, even if the real money is elsewhere.
