The Humanoid 100

The Humanoid 100 is a research report published by Morgan Stanley Research on February 6, 2025, under the title "The Humanoid 100: Mapping the Humanoid Robot Value Chain."^[1][2] It sorts roughly 100 publicly traded companies that Morgan Stanley's analysts judged relevant to building, training, and deploying humanoid robots into three layers, Brain, Body, and Integrators, giving investors a single map of an emerging corner of the robotics industry that otherwise spans semiconductors, motors, batteries, and final-assembly robotics all at once.^[3][4] It was produced by Morgan Stanley's global equity research franchise, credited in coverage to autos and shared-mobility analyst Adam Jonas together with China industrials analyst Sheng Zhong and specialists drawn from the firm's semiconductor, industrial-automation, and consumer-technology desks.^[5]

In brief: the Humanoid 100 is a stock picker's supply-chain chart. Instead of asking which company builds the best humanoid robot, it asks who has to succeed, across chips, motors, batteries, and final assembly, for humanoid robots to become a real industry, then names roughly 100 tradable stocks that fit somewhere on that chain.

Origins and why it drew attention

Morgan Stanley had covered humanoid robots since at least 2024, when the bank's research floated a global total addressable market of $357 billion by 2040 for humanoid robot hardware and services.^[6] By early 2025 that theme had accelerated. Tesla's Optimus program was working toward higher-volume prototypes, and Unitree's dancing humanoids drew a large domestic television audience during China's Lunar New Year CCTV Gala broadcast in late January 2025, a moment multiple outlets cited as immediate backdrop to the report.^[7] The Humanoid 100 addressed a specific problem for equity investors: outside of Tesla and Nvidia, there was no obvious public stock through which to take a direct position on humanoid robotics, since most dedicated humanoid developers, Unitree among them, were still privately held in early 2025.^[7] Rather than limit itself to the small set of visible humanoid makers, Morgan Stanley mapped a much larger set of what it called "first derivative enablers," established public companies supplying the components, chips, and software that any humanoid program depends on, regardless of whose logo ends up on the finished robot.^[3]

Financial media in the US, Europe, and Asia picked up the report quickly, including CNBC, the South China Morning Post, Seeking Alpha, Yahoo Finance, and multiple Chinese-language outlets, and some commentators began informally tracking the combined performance of the named stocks as though the list were an index.^[6][7][8] Within weeks, Morgan Stanley's wealth-management arm filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an actual retail investment product built on the theme, discussed under Limitations below.^[9]

The three-layer framework

Morgan Stanley organized the roughly 100 companies into three layers that mirror how a humanoid robot is actually built: a computing and software layer that gives it intelligence, a hardware layer that gives it a physical body, and a layer of companies that assemble and ship complete robots.^[3][4] Secondary reporting on the report's internal breakdown put the Brain layer at 22 companies, the Body layer at 64, and Integrators at 22; those subtotals add to somewhat more than 100 because a handful of companies, Tesla in particular, are discussed in coverage of the report as spanning more than one layer.^[10]

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Brain

The Brain layer covers the chips, models, and software that give a humanoid its perception and decision-making, treating humanoid robots as one of the leading commercial proving grounds for embodied AI, pairing large models with real-world sensors and actuators rather than running purely in a data center.^[3] Coverage of the report names Nvidia's AI accelerator GPUs and robotics computing hardware alongside broader compute and cloud players such as Alphabet and Microsoft, plus analog and embedded-chip suppliers including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Analog Devices.^[10] In China, Baidu and Horizon Robotics are the Brain-layer names that recur most often in secondary reporting.^[10]

Body

The Body layer, by far the largest of the three in company count, covers the physical hardware: actuators, motors, gearboxes, sensors, batteries, and structural materials.^[10] It is where China's existing manufacturing base, built up over more than a decade of electric-vehicle and consumer-electronics production, shows up most directly, and where names like the rare-earth and magnet producer MP Materials, reducer maker Harmonic Drive Systems, and motion-control supplier Hiwin Technologies appear in coverage alongside battery makers CATL and LG Energy Solution and automotive-parts supplier Tuopu.^[8][10] Financial press that tracked the list's performance singled out MP Materials as its standout mover in the months after publication.^[8]

Integrators

Integrators are the companies actually assembling and fielding complete humanoid robots, spanning automakers, consumer-electronics and internet companies, and dedicated robotics firms.^[10] Tesla anchors this layer with its Optimus program; Hyundai Motor appears through its ownership of Boston Dynamics; and Chinese names including UBTECH, BYD, Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Tencent recur across coverage.^[9][10] At least one detailed account of the list also placed large diversified technology companies such as Apple, Samsung, and Amazon in this layer, reflecting the analysts' broad reading of strategic optionality (consumer platforms, cloud infrastructure, logistics robotics) rather than a confirmed, shipping humanoid product from each of them; Samsung's stake in Korean robotics maker Rainbow Robotics is the clearest concrete link among that group.^[10]

Using the framework to analyze the humanoid bill of materials

The Brain, Body, Integrators split is useful for more than stock-picking because it lines up with how a humanoid's bill of materials is actually organized. Cost concentrates in a relatively small number of Body-layer subsystems, actuators, batteries, sensors, and structural parts, while the Brain layer supplies comparatively low-cost-per-unit but strategically difficult-to-substitute chips and models, and Integrators capture assembly, software integration, and go-to-market spending on top.^[10] Reading a specific humanoid program through this lens means asking, layer by layer, which supplier relationships are exclusive versus commoditized, where China's manufacturing base creates a durable cost advantage (chiefly in Body-layer hardware), and where a shortage of alternatives, as with advanced AI accelerators, creates a bottleneck no matter how many integrators exist.^[7][10]

The framework's limitation as a bill-of-materials tool is the flip side of what makes it useful as an investment map: it is organized by company, not by part number. The actuator supply base feeding Tesla's Optimus program, for instance, already overlaps heavily with suppliers to electric vehicles and factory automation, so the Body layer largely reuses existing automotive and industrial supply chains rather than describing an entirely new one built from scratch.^[3][4]

China and US exposure

Coverage of the report's country mix is not fully consistent across outlets, itself a reminder that this is an analyst list rather than an audited index. China News Service, citing the report directly, put the headquarters split at 35 companies in China, 35 in the US and Canada, 18 elsewhere in Asia-Pacific (mostly Japan and South Korea), and 12 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.^[2] The South China Morning Post instead described China's share of the full list as 56 percent, without specifying an identical denominator, and a China-focused automation trade outlet put China's share of the humanoid supply chain, as distinct from company headcount, at 63 percent, concentrated in Body-layer hardware.^[7][10] Layer-by-layer counts are more legible: one detailed breakdown put China at roughly 24 of the 64 Body-layer companies and 10 of the 22 Integrators, but only a small handful of the Brain layer, which skews toward the United States.^[10]

What the sources agree on, and what made the report notable, is the shape of the imbalance rather than its exact size: China's advantage sits overwhelmingly in manufacturing hardware, not in chips or foundation models, a pattern analysts outside the report have connected to more than a decade of industrial policy, including the Made in China 2025 initiative's push into precision manufacturing and robotics, though the Humanoid 100 report itself focuses on company names rather than policy causes.^[7] Morgan Stanley's own framing, quoted directly by multiple outlets, was that "a common refrain we hear from investors is the lack of Western firms to add to their humanoid portfolio outside of Tesla and Nvidia."^[7] For broader context on how China's AI sector factors into this buildout, see China AI.

How big a market, according to Morgan Stanley

Market-size estimates tied to the Humanoid 100 theme have shifted across several Morgan Stanley notes published at different times, and should be read as distinct figures for distinct scopes rather than one settled number.

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The $5 trillion figure came with a unit forecast of more than 1 billion humanoids in use by 2050, with Morgan Stanley projecting adoption stays slow through the early 2030s before accelerating in the late 2030s and 2040s.^[11][12] None of these figures appear inside the original February 2025 Humanoid 100 PDF itself as far as secondary coverage indicates; they belong to the bank's broader, evolving humanoid-robotics research rather than to the value-chain map specifically, which is one more reason to attribute each number to its own note and date rather than treating "Morgan Stanley's number" as singular.

Reception, performance tracking, and follow-on products

Performance tracking became part of the story. An analysis published months after launch found the roughly 100 stocks, equal-weighted, up 11.1 percent since the report's inception versus 3.5 percent for the S&P 500 over the same stretch, with MP Materials the single best performer at more than 145 percent.^[8] A later account from financial newsletter The Idea Farm put cumulative performance closer to 25 percent, a reminder that different trackers use different rebalancing assumptions and cutoff dates rather than there being one official return figure for a research list.^[14] Morgan Stanley's analysts periodically refreshed the roster: Seeking Alpha covered at least one update, and Futu News reported a later revision that added gaming and cybersecurity-adjacent names, including Unity, Roblox, Take-Two Interactive, CyberArk, and Palo Alto Networks, on the logic that simulation engines and fleet-security software are also humanoid-robot enablers.^[15][16]

The idea outgrew the research note itself. On March 7, 2025, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney filed a Form S-6 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for Morgan Stanley Portfolios, Series 81, a unit investment trust named "Humanoid Robotics" that commits at least 80 percent of its net assets to companies meeting the firm's humanoid-robotics investment criteria.^[9] The filing turned a research theme into an actual retail product, though, as covered next, a fund's regulatory holdings list is a distinct, more tightly defined thing than a research note's illustrative company map.

Limitations and how to read the list

Morgan Stanley's own description of the list, echoed in financial press coverage, calls it "dynamic" and "continuously evolving along with industry developments," with companies added and dropped as the analysts' view of the value chain changes.^[8][15] Several limits follow directly from that framing:

• It is analyst judgment, not certification. Inclusion means Morgan Stanley's research team judged a company a plausible enabler of the humanoid value chain, not that the company has disclosed material humanoid-related revenue today. Large, diversified names appearing in some accounts of the list reflect strategic optionality more than a confirmed shipping product.^[10]
• It is not the same thing as the investable trust. Morgan Stanley Wealth Management's Series 81 unit investment trust draws on the same theme but has its own prospectus-defined selection criteria and an 80 percent minimum-allocation rule; its actual holdings are not guaranteed to match the research note's company list one for one.^[9]
• Market-size figures attached to the theme vary by date and scope, from $357 billion by 2040 in the 2024 outlook to roughly $5 trillion by 2050 (covering robots, supply chain, and maintenance) in 2025 updates, alongside a separate, narrower estimate of about $3 trillion for the US market alone by 2050.^{[6][11][12][13]}
• Geographic and layer breakdowns differ by outlet, as detailed above, because different secondary sources use different denominators: share of all 100 companies, share of a single layer, or share of estimated supply-chain value.^[2][7][10]

None of this makes the report less useful as a map of the humanoid robot market. It means the map is best read as one bank's structured opinion about where value concentrates in a fast-moving industry, cross-checked against other analysts and against individual companies' own disclosures, rather than as an audited constituent list.

The picture in mid-2026

The universe the report tried to map keeps changing in ways that test its own premise. Several integrators that were private, and therefore ineligible for a publicly traded stock list, in February 2025 have advanced quickly: Figure AI continued shipping units of its Figure 03 humanoid, 1X Technologies' 1X NEO moved toward home-robot deployment, and Apptronik, Fourier Intelligence, AgiBot, and XPeng's Iron program each advanced their own humanoid platforms. Unitree itself, the company whose viral demonstration helped set the stage for the original report, cleared China Securities Regulatory Commission approval in July 2026 for a Shanghai STAR Market initial public offering targeting roughly $618 million, a step that would make it eligible, for the first time, for the kind of publicly traded company list the Humanoid 100 is built from.^[17][18] That points to a structural feature of any report like this one: because it can only name stocks that trade, it necessarily lags the private-market frontier of humanoid robotics, and is likely to be revised again as more developers go public.

See also

• Humanoid robot
• Humanoid robot market
• Robotics
• Embodied AI
• Tesla Optimus
• Nvidia
• Boston Dynamics
• Unitree
• UBTECH
• China AI

References

1. Morgan Stanley Research, "The Humanoid 100: Mapping the Humanoid Robot Value Chain" (PDF). https://advisor.morganstanley.com/john.howard/documents/field/j/jo/john-howard/The_Humanoid_100_-_Mapping_the_Humanoid_Robot_Value_Chain.pdf ↩
2. China News Service (ecns.cn), "China holds leading position in humanoid robot industry: report" (February 19, 2025). https://www.ecns.cn/cns-wire/2025-02-19/detail-ihenxmvs7432462.shtml ↩
3. Investing.com, "Morgan Stanley presents the 'Humanoid 100': How to play the Humanoid Robot theme" (February 2025). https://www.investing.com/news/general/morgan-stanley-presents-the-humanoid-100-how-to-play-the-humanoid-robot-theme-3856550 ↩
4. Moomoo, "China leads the body, NVIDIA aims to be the brain, and Tesla 'integrates': Morgan Stanley elaborates on the top 100 humanoid robot companies." https://www.moomoo.com/news/post/48926089/china-leads-the-body-nvidia-aims-to-be-the-brain ↩
5. Morgan Stanley, "The Rise of the Humanoid Economy," Thoughts on the Market podcast, with Adam Jonas and Sheng Zhong. https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/podcasts/thoughts-on-the-market/humanoid-robot-market-rising-adam-jonas-sheng-zhong ↩
6. Morgan Stanley, "Humanoid Robot Market: $357 Billion Impact Anticipated by 2040" (2024). https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/humanoid-robot-market-outlook-2024 ↩
7. South China Morning Post, "China holds dominant position in humanoid robot ecosystem: analysts." https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3299162/china-holds-dominant-position-humanoid-robot-ecosystem-analysts ↩
8. Yahoo Finance / Investing (Sam Boughedda), "Morgan Stanley Humanoid 100 list up 11.1% since inception, outperforming indices." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/morgan-stanley-humanoid-100-list-133041576.html ↩
9. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR filing, Morgan Stanley Portfolios, Series 81 (Humanoid Robotics unit investment trust), Form S-6. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2058920/000110465925021611/a25-7623_1s6.htm ↩
10. Sango Automation, "Interpretation of the Morgan Stanley Report: The Rise of the Whole Chain and the Breakthrough of the Industry of Humanoid Robots." https://www.sango-automation.com/news/interpretation-of-the-morgan-stanley-report-t-84951299.html ↩
11. Morgan Stanley, "Humanoid Robot Market Expected to Reach $5 Trillion by 2050." https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/humanoid-robot-market-5-trillion-by-2050 ↩
12. CNBC, "Morgan Stanley says humanoid robots will be a $5 trillion market by 2050. How to play it" (April 29, 2025). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/how-to-play-a-5-trillion-market-for-humanoid-robots-by-2050.html ↩
13. Robotics and Automation News, "Morgan Stanley forecasts $3 trillion US market for humanoid robots by 2050" (May 2, 2025). https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/05/02/humanoid-robots-could-unlock-3-trillion-us-market-says-morgan-stanley/90261/ ↩
14. The Idea Farm, "The Humanoid 100: Mapping the Humanoid Robot Value Chain." https://theideafarm.com/markets/the-humanoid-100-mapping-the-humanoid-robot-value-chain/ ↩
15. Seeking Alpha, "Robots are coming: Morgan Stanley updates its 'Humanoid 100' stock list." https://seekingalpha.com/news/4459382-robots-are-coming-morgan-stanley-updates-its-humanoid-100-stock-list ↩
16. Futu News, "Morgan Stanley Injects New Ideas into the 'Humanoid Robotics 100' List: Gaming and Cybersecurity Companies." https://news.futunn.com/en/post/58226645/morgan-stanley-injects-new-ideas-into-the-humanoid-robotics-100 ↩
17. South China Morning Post, "Unitree clears key hurdle to Shanghai IPO as China's humanoid robot wave gathers pace" (July 2026). https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3355538/unitree-clears-key-hurdle-shanghai-ipo-chinas-humanoid-robot-wave-gathers-pace ↩
18. CNBC, "Nvidia picks Unitree for humanoid robot platform as Chinese startup eyes IPO" (June 1, 2026). https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/nvidia-unitree-humanoid-robotics-system-researchers.html ↩