Supply Chains & Critical Minerals
Rare earths are critical to making modern weapons, and China dominates the supply chain — leaving U.S. defence production structurally dependent on a strategic rival.
Rare-earth exposure sits several tiers down your BOM. If you buy magnets, motors or actuators, trace where the material actually starts.
Geopolitics & Trade
Acting on White House task force findings, FCC chairman Brendan Carr added foreign-made humanoid robots, quadrupeds and power inverters to the agency's Covered List, denying them the authorisation nearly every electronic device requires to be sold in the U.S.
North American buyers just lost legal access to the cheapest humanoid and quadruped platforms. Re-check authorisation before you spec one.
Industrial Policy & Regulation
Sources at major Chinese LLM developers say the country's most advanced models are still trained on Nvidia chips. The high cost of switching to local semiconductors, and the engineering bottleneck of changing chip architecture, continue to hamper Beijing's self-sufficiency drive.
Industrial policy does not beat switching costs. The same inertia is what keeps your plant on its incumbent control platform.
Supply Chains & Critical Minerals
SMIC and Hua Hong Grace saw Q2 net profits jump 261.7 per cent and 385.9 per cent year on year, to US$479.2 million and US$38.6 million, amid a spike in demand for domestic AI chips free of US export controls.
Export controls are building a parallel, profitable Chinese chip base — increasingly where the components in your equipment originate.
Robotics & Embodied AI
Chinese manufacturers accounted for more than 97 per cent of global humanoid robot shipments in H1 2026. Global shipments hit about 19,100 units, up from roughly 5,100 a year earlier — AgiBot about 8,400 units (44%), Unitree about 5,900.
Humanoid volume is real and almost entirely Chinese, which makes the new US import restrictions a direct constraint on Western adoption.
Robotics & Embodied AI
Unitree Robotics' Shanghai IPO was more than 5,500 times oversubscribed by retail investors, drawing 9.8 million individual orders for a 6.1 billion yuan (US$900 million) sale. Just 0.018 per cent of orders will be filled.
Capital is far ahead of capability. Judge humanoids on your own cycle-time data, not on the valuation of the company selling them.
AI / LLMs in Industry
DeepSeek opened a developer preview of Harness, an open-source framework for turning AI models into autonomous agents that operate external software, run code and complete complex jobs. It marks a strategic pivot beyond large language models.
Open-weight agent tooling drives the cost of an industrial AI pilot toward zero — the constraint becomes your data, not the model licence.
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