Every empire that lasted won a war of attrition: more output, for longer, from a supply chain the other side couldn't break. Rome had roads. Britain had coal and steam. America had Detroit in 1942.
The next one runs on robots.
When people are both your highest cost and your scarcest resource, the side that turns capital into tireless labor fastest pulls ahead: in factories, in logistics, and increasingly on the battlefield. That race is on right now between the US and China, and almost nobody is keeping score in one place.
So we built a scoreboard: the Robot Race Tracker.
Where the race stands today
• 97%: China's share of global humanoid shipments in the first half of 2026.
• 2.7×: what a Western humanoid costs to build compared with a Chinese one.
• ~60,000: humanoids expected to ship worldwide this year, up from roughly 13–17,000 in 2025.
• 3 critical chokepoints: rare-earth magnets and battery cells threaten the US, and AI chips threaten China.
Who's winning depends on the race you think this is. On our balanced scorecard, China leads 59–41. Weight it for production, meaning an attrition war, and China leads 72–28. Weight it for AI models, compute and talent, and the US leads 55–45. Both are true at the same time, and that tension is the story.
What you'll get each month
• updated shipments by country
• chokepoint alerts when a supply risk changes level
• the forecast ladder, our dated calls with probabilities, which we'll revise in public so you can grade us
Explore the tracker: empiresandengines.com
If you know someone who should be watching this race (an investor, an operator, a reporter, a policy person), forward them this email.
Mankind needs robots.
Larry