Nvidia's humanoid play is the Android strategy all over again

So what's the alternative?

This is where it gets tricky. The alternative to building on Nvidia's stack is building your own stack, which requires capital that most humanoid startups don't have and expertise that's genuinely scarce. Figure and 1X and Apptronik are all well-funded but they're not Nvidia-funded, and training foundation models from scratch is not cheap.

Some of the bigger players might try to maintain independence. Tesla's obviously doing their own thing with Optimus, and the Chinese companies (Unitree, various others) seem to be building more vertically integrated stacks. But for the Western startups trying to get to market in the next two to three years, Nvidia's offer is going to be hard to refuse.

The question these founders should be asking, and I suspect some of them are, is what happens in year five. When Nvidia has the data from your deployments and the relationships with your customers and the ability to adjust pricing or API terms. The kids running these companies are smart but some of them weren't around for the mobile platform wars and it shows.

What remains unclear

A few things I couldn't nail down from the available reporting:

First, the economics. Nvidia hasn't disclosed what the revenue share or licensing terms look like for GR00T deployments. "Partnerships" can mean a lot of things, and the difference between "we take 5% of deployment revenue" and "we take 30%" is the difference between a sustainable business and a thin-margin hardware trap.

Second, the technical depth. The SDK supports "a half-dozen robot platforms" according to Reuters, but we don't know how much work is required to actually integrate a new platform, or how much of the model's capability transfers across different mechanical configurations. Foundation models are supposed to generalize but in practice the generalization is often, let's say, optimistic.

Third, the competitive response. What are the Chinese platform players doing? What's Google doing with their robotics research? Is anyone else going to try to build an open alternative? It's too early to say but these questions will matter a lot in 18 months.

The bottom line

Nvidia is making a big bet on humanoids and they're doing it the smart way, by becoming infrastructure rather than building robots themselves. This is probably good for the near-term development of the industry because it lowers barriers and provides shared tooling that accelerates everyone.

But I've been around long enough to know that platform dependency is a trap that looks like an opportunity, and the humanoid companies signing up for GR00T should be thinking very carefully about their long-term positioning. The ones that survive will probably be the ones that treat Nvidia as a tool rather than a foundation, that build proprietary capability on top of the shared layer rather than just assembling commodity parts.

Then again, what do I know. Maybe this time is different and the platform provider will remain a benevolent partner forever. If you want to argue about it, my email's on the about page.

Sarah Williams · 7 hours ago · 4 min