Retail flows across Asia remained heavily concentrated in newly listed, high-beta names, most notably Chinese robotics maker Unitree following its blockbuster Shanghai debut. The retail craze surrounding physical AI merely shows Beijing's accelerating push to dominate the humanoid market.
To close out the week, we pivot across the Pacific for a peek inside the US humanoid-robotics supply chain, where Tesla's Fremont buildout provides a timely indicator of how quickly physical AI is advancing.
Rajat Gupta, a JPMorgan analyst who covers Tesla, recently toured Tesla's Fremont factory and reported to clients this week that the facility, once the birthplace of the company's electric vehicles, is now pivoting toward producing robotaxis and humanoid robots.
Gupta and his colleagues toured the roughly 5-million-square-foot facility and found that the discontinued Model S and Model X production lines are being replaced by manufacturing equipment for Tesla's Optimus humanoid.
"On Optimus, production lines are being installed at Fremont (the area was tarped off at the time of our visit), and TSLA remains largely on schedule for the targeted four-month transition following the end of S/X production in May, with initial humanoid deployments in 2H26 expected to focus on Optimus Academy for training and data collection, followed by internal factory use and external sales as early as 2H27," the analyst said.
He said that Optimus robots are not currently working inside the Fremont plant. Initial deployments in the second half of 2026 will instead take place at the "Optimus Academy," where the robots will collect real-world training data before being deployed in factories.
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