For all the headlines about humanoid robots taking over factory floors and living rooms, the first-ever official sales tally tells a far humbler story: about 7,000 humanoids were sold worldwide last year for industrial and professional-service use.
The figure comes from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), which is publishing humanoid-robot numbers for the first time, in data reviewed by Reuters ahead of release. China is the largest market, the federation said.
Context makes the number even starker. The IFR counted roughly 542,000 regular industrial robots installed in 2024 and about 199,000 service robots sold that same year. Humanoids, the industry’s most-hyped category, amount to a rounding error by comparison.
The Buyers Aren’t Really Buying Workers
Perhaps the most telling detail isn’t the total — it’s what the robots are actually doing. According to Reuters, IFR’s Susanne Bieller says many of last year’s buyers were research institutions or companies purchasing robots to generate AI training data, not to do productive work.
Carmakers — the industry’s traditional early adopters of new automation — are running only small pilots. Bieller described trials of “single-digit or sometimes double-digit” robots at auto plants. That’s a company testing a handful of machines, not retooling an assembly line.
The picture this paints is one of an industry still deep in the research and development phase: companies buying humanoids to teach robots how to walk, grasp, and navigate before any of them can reliably clock in.
Wall Street Sees a Boom Coming Anyway
Optimists aren’t reading the IFR tally as a ceiling. Bank of America estimates humanoid shipments could hit 90,000 this year and reach 1.2 million by 2030 — a forecast that assumes the technology crosses from lab curiosity to genuine industrial tool within a few short years.
That kind of ramp would be historic. Industrial robots themselves took decades to reach half a million annual installations. For humanoids to go from 7,000 to 90,000 in a single year would require the current wave of pilots to convert into real orders at a pace the robotics industry has rarely seen.
The truth probably sits between the hype and the tally: humanoids are real products now, but they’re products with almost no customers yet.
Why This Matters
These numbers are a reality check for investors, startups, and buyers navigating one of tech’s frothiest markets. Seven thousand units is not a mass market — it’s a prototype market. Valuations and forecasts built on assumptions of imminent mass deployment now have to be weighed against data showing that most “sales” are research buys, and that the biggest industrial robot buyers on the planet are still in the single-digits stage.
More data is coming fast: the IFR publishes its full 2025 figures for industrial and service robots on September 24, which should show whether humanoids are gaining ground on their conventional cousins or still running far behind.
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