Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2050, global robot hardware sales will surge from approximately USD 100 billion in 2025 to USD 25 trillion, with unit sales increasing from 24 million to 1.4 billion. China demonstrates a clear leading advantage, particularly in terms of policy support, control over key materials, and manufacturing capabilities. By 2050, China is expected to account for approximately 26% of global robot sales.
Artificial intelligence is undergoing a fundamental shift—from the digital world to the physical world. According to the latest global robotics model from Morgan Stanley, this transformation will give rise to a global robotics hardware market worth $25 trillion. As AI technology expands from handling 'bits and bytes' in the knowledge economy to manipulating 'atoms and photons' in the physical economy, a 'Cambrian explosion' in the field of robotics is on the horizon.
According to TradingView, the Morgan Stanley Global Embodied AI team forecasted in the newly released 'Robotics Compendium' that under the baseline scenario, global robotics hardware sales will surge from approximately $100 billion in 2025 to $500 billion by 2030, reaching $9 trillion by 2040 and climbing to $25 trillion by 2050. This projection only covers hardware sales; if software services, maintenance, and supply chain-related revenues are included, the market size could multiply.
In this transformation, China has demonstrated clear leadership advantages, particularly in terms of manufacturing capabilities, control over rare earth materials, and policy support across multiple dimensions. As Chinese companies accelerate the mass production and application of robots, the global market landscape is undergoing profound changes. Morgan Stanley believes that China’s leading position is expected to continue expanding over the next decade.
Five key factors catalyze exponential growth in the global robotics market
Through its Global Robotics Outlook Model (GROM), Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2050, 1.4 billion robots will be sold globally, with the total number of operational robots reaching 6.5 billion.
The forms of robots will be highly diversified, including industrial robots, service robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, and home robots, covering various application scenarios ranging from manufacturing to healthcare, agriculture, transportation, defense, space exploration, and more.
According to Morgan Stanley's estimates, approximately 90 million robots will be sold globally by 2030, and this figure will increase to 600 million by 2040. Among these, small drones and home robots hold the most market potential in the near term, while humanoid robots are expected to begin large-scale deployment between 2029 and 2030.
Surging demand for key components
The explosive growth of the robotics industry will bring significant opportunities for upstream component suppliers.
Morgan Stanley forecasts that supporting the sale of 1.4 billion robots by 2050 will require: 5.7 billion cameras (a 95-fold increase from 2025), 27 billion motors (a 260-fold increase), 41 billion bearings (a 200-fold increase), 12.5 million ExaFLOPS of edge computing capacity (a 40,000-fold increase), 1.7 million tons of rare earth magnets (a 480-fold increase), and 26 terawatt-hours of battery capacity (a 1,450-fold increase).
This surge in demand will create significant business opportunities for suppliers of motors, bearings, rare earths, cameras, sensors, AI chips, batteries, and more.
Morgan Stanley believes that small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Low-Altitude Robotic Systems (LARS) represent the investment areas with the greatest near-term potential. This assessment is primarily based on three factors: the relative ease of navigation in three-dimensional space, increased government prioritization driven by lessons from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the gradual maturation of regulatory frameworks.
China’s manufacturing advantages are evident, dominating the 'body' of robotics.
The Morgan Stanley report specifically highlights that in the embodied intelligence race, data collection and manufacturing capabilities are inseparable. To build excellent robots, it is necessary to first produce a large number of 'imperfect' robots for data collection and model training. While prototyping is relatively straightforward, scaling production poses the real challenge.
In this regard, China demonstrates clear advantages. According to Morgan Stanley statistics, venture capital investments in the robotics and drone sectors are expected to exceed USD 300 billion by 2025, with total AI-related enterprise financing reaching USD 2.6 trillion, where Chinese companies hold a significant position. The list of humanoid robot developers includes numerous Chinese firms, such as Ubtech Robotics, XPeng Robotics, and Leju Robotics.
From a segmented market perspective, China has achieved mass production and scaled applications in industrial robots, service robots, drones, autonomous driving, and medical robots. Morgan Stanley predicts that over the next decade, China's robot sales and industry scale will continue to surpass those of major economies like the US and Europe. Control over supply chain segments such as rare earths, key components, and computing power also provides Chinese companies with long-term competitive barriers.
Morgan Stanley forecasts that by 2050, China will account for approximately 26% of global robot sales, with even higher shares in the industrial robot and drone sectors.
In fact, as early as February this year, Morgan Stanley systematically analyzed the global humanoid robotics industry chain for the first time, identifying 100 core listed companies across three key areas: the 'brain,' 'body,' and 'integrators.' It pointed out that China holds a 63% share in the humanoid robotics supply chain, demonstrating a dominant position, particularly in the 'body' segment.
Morgan Stanley believes that manufacturing capability will become a core competency in the era of embodied intelligence, marking a stark contrast to the previous digital AI era, which focused on software and algorithms. Data, software, manufacturing, and hardware form a recursive loop, mutually defining and reinforcing one another.
Editor/jayden
