NVIDIA's CEO Steps Down, and Agile Robots Raises $500 Million

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0:00Headlines

This is Robot Frontline News for Friday, November thirteenth. Here's what we're following. The company behind many robot brains loses its CEO. Germany's Agile Robots raises half a billion dollars.

A logistics giant eyes a thousand humanoids. A bank's big bet on U.S.-made robots. ABB lands a seventeen-hundred-robot deal with BMW.

New robot AI models, free to download. A huge seed round for simulated worlds. China's warehouse robots head west.

HD Hyundai builds its own robot AI. A defense maker of ground robots raises big money. And a delivery robot meets winter.

0:50US · NVIDIA's CEO steps down

We start with a shake-up at the company that powers much of the robot industry. Jensen Huang has resigned as NVIDIA's chief executive, effective immediately. Chief financial officer Colette Kress is now interim CEO, and Harvey Jones becomes the board's first independent chair.

The company's statement gives no reason. It follows days of press reports about Huang's private life, which NVIDIA hasn't addressed. Why it matters here: NVIDIA's GR00T models and Jetson Thor computers sit inside many of today's humanoids. NVIDIA says its roadmap is unchanged, and it reports earnings on November seventeenth.

1:31EUROPE · Agile Robots raises $500 million

In Europe, the week's biggest robot funding round. Munich's Agile Robots has raised five hundred million dollars, led by SoftBank, with NVIDIA and Hitachi joining in. That values the company at eight and a half billion dollars.

Agile Robots started as a spin-off of Germany's aerospace center, and says it has installed more than twenty thousand robot systems. Its plant near Munich can build up to ten thousand humanoids a year. That's capacity. It hasn't said how many it has actually shipped. The money goes to a push into the U.S., and more production, including in Germany.

2:13US · GXO eyes up to 1,000 Apollo humanoids

In the U.S., warehouse giant GXO wants more humanoids, eventually. It has signed a letter of intent with Apptronik for up to one thousand Apollo robots over four years. That's not an order. It's non-binding, and it depends on trials meeting agreed targets for productivity and safety.

Expanded trials start in twenty twenty-seven, with a first North American rollout planned for late that year. GXO runs more than a thousand warehouses, so even a thousand robots would be a small share of its sites. GXO would pay per robot as a service, rather than buy them outright.

2:54US · J.P. Morgan: up to 400,000 U.S. humanoids by 2030

And a big forecast to go with it. J.P. Morgan, as reported by Reuters, expects U.S. humanoid production to reach three hundred to four hundred thousand units by twenty thirty, and about one and a half million by twenty thirty-five.

The bank says demand isn't the problem. Supply is: hands, motors, the AI brain, and factories to build them. For comparison, most U.S. makers other than Tesla are aiming for ten to thirty thousand robots a year. It's a projection, not a count. And the reports don't say if it's yearly or cumulative.

3:34EUROPE · ABB lands 1,700 robots for BMW

Back in Europe, the classic factory robot is still selling. ABB is supplying more than seventeen hundred large robots for BMW's new generation of electric cars. They'll weld, glue, rivet and assemble car bodies at BMW's main plant in Munich, and at its Tiexi plant in China.

The two companies have done this before, including an earlier framework deal for twenty-four hundred robots. The biggest of them can lift six hundred and twenty kilos.

4:07AI · Robot brains go open

Now to AI, and two releases anyone can download. Runway, best known for AI video, has released its Praxis-1 robot model with open weights. On NVIDIA's RoboLab test, Runway says it succeeds forty-six percent of the time, ahead of the rivals it compared.

Top of the table, but still failing more than half the time. And Apple researchers describe AMP1, which lets general AI chatbots write the code that drives a robot arm, with no robot training data. They report a hundred and four successes in a hundred and eight real trials. That's a single report, and the paper still needs checking.

4:51EUROPE · A $700 million seed round for world models

Also in AI, a startup with no product has reportedly raised up to seven hundred million dollars. London's Emulate was founded in August by three former Google DeepMind researchers behind the Genie world models. Index Ventures and Lightspeed reportedly led the round, with NVIDIA's venture arm and the game-engine maker Unity taking part.

It builds simulated worlds to train robots, and the reported valuation is three point seven billion dollars. There's no official announcement yet.

5:28CHINA · Cainiao's climbing robot heads to Europe

In China, Alibaba's logistics arm Cainiao has upgraded the robot that climbs its warehouse shelves. It now grabs bins from four sides, and Cainiao says it packs twenty percent more storage into the same space. It already has orders in the Netherlands and Spain, and Cainiao says it now works in twenty-nine countries.

Also from China: chip startup Xixuan Chuangzhi, backed by UBTech, has raised about five hundred million yuan to build onboard computers for robots, part of a push to rely less on NVIDIA's chips.

6:06JAPAN-KOREA · HD Hyundai builds its own robot brain

In South Korea, HD Hyundai Robotics has shown its first two-armed robot with five-fingered hands, run by its own AI model. It's meant first for sorting parts on a mobile base, then for welding and painting. The same day in Seoul, the head of U.S. startup Skild AI pitched Korean makers of motors and actuators on building bodies for its robot brain.

The company hasn't published any success rates yet, and no Skild partnership has been announced.

6:39DEFENSE · UFORCE raises $700 million

On the defense desk, UFORCE, a London-based company with Ukrainian roots, has raised seven hundred million dollars. That values it at six billion. Britain's National Wealth Fund co-led the round with Valor Equity Partners. The company says the money will expand production, including its LIUT family of ground robots.

Its combat claims are the company's own, and can't be independently verified.

7:08US · DoorDash's Dot meets the snow

And finally, a robot learning about winter. DoorDash has eight of its Dot delivery robots out in Salt Lake City, gathering data in snow and rain. Dot weighs about three hundred and fifty pounds, mostly uses bike lanes, and isn't carrying customer orders there yet.

7:28Sources and sign-off

That's Robot Frontline News for this week. You'll find every source in the description. Have a good weekend, and we'll see you on Monday.