Meta just bought its way into humanoid robots

Meta’s next trick: robots with legs

Meta Platforms isn’t just trying to make your feed smarter. It’s now trying to make machines that can move through the real world without face-planting into a coffee table.

The company acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a humanoid robotics startup, and brought the team into its Superintelligence Labs unit. The price tag wasn’t disclosed, which is corporate speak for “we’re not telling you how much this chess move cost.”

Why this matters

This isn’t a random side quest. Meta is clearly betting that the next big AI prize isn’t just chatbots that write emails — it’s physical AI that can do stuff in the real world. Think warehouse work, manufacturing, logistics, maybe even home robots someday if the future gets weird enough.

The ARI team brings some legit robotics pedigree, too:

• Lerrel Pinto previously worked on approachable humanoid robots at Fauna Robotics, which Amazon acquired in March.
• Co-founder Xiaolong Wang spent time as a researcher at Nvidia before joining UC San Diego.

That means Meta isn’t just buying a startup. It’s buying talent from a very short list of people who actually know how to make robots less clumsy than a toddler on roller skates.

The bigger race

Meta’s move lands in a market that everyone from automakers to AI giants is now circling like it’s the last slice of pizza.

Goldman Sachs thinks humanoid robotics could reach $38 billion by 2035. Morgan Stanley’s long-game estimate is far more bonkers: $5 trillion by 2050. Meanwhile, Xiaomi has already deployed humanoid robots in an EV plant, and Figure AI is talking about 100,000 deployments over four years.

Big picture: Meta just made it clearer that it wants a seat at the physical-AI table — and maybe eventually a robot body to go with the brain.