Nobody Agrees How Many Humanoids Shipped

News window: September 28–October 5, 2026

Editor’s Note

IDC put out a number this week that will get quoted for months: close to 25,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, up 432 percent from a year earlier. A few days earlier, coverage of the IFR’s annual report noted it counted about 7,000 humanoids sold for industrial and professional use in all of 2025. Both can be true, because they aren’t counting the same thing. Meanwhile, the most concrete robotics deployment of the week came from a warehouse in Poland with no humanoids in it at all.

Stress Test

Hitachi × Agile Robots and Hitachi × FANUC — physical AI for the factory floor

Claim

Hitachi announced two partnerships aimed at factory work that still depends on human judgment. With Agile Robots, it will combine Hitachi’s physical AI work, manufacturing expertise and edge AI chips with Agile’s robot arms, mobile robots, AgileCore software and Agile One humanoid, targeting parts handling, machine loading, assembly and production changeovers. Hitachi plans to sell the results globally through its HMAX Industry portfolio. A separate partnership with FANUC will use Hitachi Group factories as the validation environment, refining applications on Hitachi’s own shop floors before offering them to customers.

Demonstrated vs. marketing

Nothing is deployed yet. Coverage notes that neither announcement gives a deal value, order quantities, a deployment timetable or a named customer, and no specific humanoid deployment is identified. What is concrete is who’s involved: a large industrial manufacturer, the world’s best-known industrial arm maker, and a plan to test in factories Hitachi actually runs.

Deployment reality

The direction is right. This reads like a manufacturer adopting new technology for problems it already has in its own plants, not a technology company looking for a problem to solve. Using its own factories as the test bed means Hitachi eats its own failures first. The FANUC half matters more than the humanoid half, because FANUC brings specialist arms that already run in production. The open question is when any of this leaves Hitachi’s walls with a price and a customer attached.

VerdictHold

Hold.

Geek+ × LPP Logistics — 1,600 robots in two Polish warehouses

Claim

Geek+ and LPP Logistics, the logistics arm of one of Central Europe’s largest apparel retailers, announced an expanded deployment running more than 1,600 Geek+ robots across two LPP sites in Poland. The system uses Geek+ RoboShuttle and P-series robots and covers 1.4 million high-bay storage locations reaching about 12 meters. Geek+ cites a 99 percent efficiency gain.

Demonstrated vs. marketing

This one has a named customer, a robot count, a site count and a quote from the customer’s CEO, which is more than most announcements carry. The 99 percent efficiency figure is vendor-reported and undefined, with no baseline or metric named. Geek+‘s line about coordinating “more than 1,000 robots in a single facility” describes what its software can do, as Polish coverage points out, not a confirmed device count per site. The announcement was distributed through PAP’s MediaRoom, a press-release channel, not independent reporting.

Deployment reality

Goods-to-person warehouse robots are a mature, unflashy category, and a retailer expanding its fleet is better evidence than any launch video. The same Polish coverage put it simply: the real test will be peak season. If the system holds through Black Friday and the holidays, that’s the number worth reporting.

VerdictBuy

Buy.

Scorecard

Claim	Status	Revisit
Physical AI for factory tasks, validated in the manufacturer’s own plants · Hitachi / Agile Robots / FANUC	Standby	~Q4 2027
Goods-to-person robot fleets at retail-fulfillment scale · Geek+ / LPP Logistics	Online	~Q1 2027

Spec Check

IDC: “close to 25,000” humanoids shipped in H1 2026, up 432 percent.

Three sources, three answers:

IDC: about 25,000 units in the first half of 2026, worth more than $740 million, with AgiBot leading at more than 8,600.
Smart Analytics Global, as reported: about 19,100 units in the same period, with AgiBot at about 8,400.
IFR: about 7,000 humanoids sold for industrial and professional service use in all of 2025.

The two H1 2026 counts agree on the leader and disagree on the total by about 6,000 units, close to a quarter of the market. IDC doesn’t publish its definition of a qualifying shipment, so there’s no way to tell from outside which units one firm counts and the other doesn’t.

The IFR number is a different category, not necessarily a contradiction. A 432 percent rise implies IDC counted only about 4,700 units in H1 2025, a similar scale to the IFR’s 7,000 for the whole year. The IFR counts robots sold for industrial and professional work. A large share of humanoid shipments go to research labs, schools and entertainment.

The most telling figure is IDC’s market value. $740 million across 25,000 units is about $29,600 per robot. That’s the price of a low-cost platform, not a production-grade factory machine. Most humanoids shipping today are being bought to experiment with, not to run a line.

Funding vs. Function

Two very different bets on physical AI this week.

SiMa.ai raised $150 million at a $1.45 billion valuation, for chips that run AI on robots, drones and vehicles. It says it has more than 150 customers and that revenue grew fourfold from 2024 to 2025, without disclosing what that revenue is. Part of the money funds a next-generation chip, rated at 1,000 TOPS, that isn’t due until the first half of 2028.

FieldAI, which builds AI software for robots in construction, energy and inspection, signed a term sheet to raise about $700 million at roughly a $10 billion valuation, per Business Insider. That would be five times its 2025 valuation. The round hadn’t closed, and the reporting doesn’t separate recognized revenue from signed-but-unbilled contracts.

Quick Hits

The Drone Service Providers Alliance asked pilots to lobby Congress after last week’s DHS drone report, arguing that procurement should follow security test results, not country of origin.
IDC expects humanoid shipments to pass 750,000 units a year by 2030. That’s a forecast, not a trend line.
SiMa.ai’s round, from the data center side: Fidelity and Amplify co-led, with Dell Technologies Capital, Point72 and the State of Michigan participating.