AI & Robotics: From $300bn to $5.2 trillion in three years | The Decade Ahead

**Bryce** (0:00)
Somewhere in an industrial zone outside Dongguan, China, a factory is producing smartphone components right now. The machines are running at full speed, but nobody turned the lights on this morning because nobody's there. The robots don't need them.
Welcome to The Decade Ahead, a 10-part series by Equity Mates unpacking 10 themes that we think are set up for the next 10 years. My name is Bryce.

**Ren** (0:26)
And I'm Ren. And today, we are talking about the intersection of AI and robotics and what that might mean for the next decade and beyond.

**Bryce** (0:34)
This episode of Equity Mates and this series is proudly brought to you by ANZ Business Start Right. Starting a business comes with a lot of what-ifs and ANZ is here to help you with what's next.

**Ren** (0:45)
Now, Bryce, your dramatic introduction there introduced the concept of dark factories, which have taken off in China and are going to be a big part of what we talk about in this episode. And if you haven't heard of the concept of dark factories, they're dark because there are no human workers. 100% staffed by robots. Robots don't need light, therefore, save your electricity bill, keep them in the dark.
Robots also don't need sleep, so run them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without interruption. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of what we're going to talk about today. But we thought it was a good place to start and particularly, we thought Donghuang in China was a good place to start, because it really shows us the potential of combining AI and robotics.

**Bryce** (1:31)
Well, the numbers speak for themselves, Ren. So the prototype for this type of factory was a company called Changying Precision Technologies in Donghuang.
It replaced 90 percent of its human workforce with machines, and the results were a 250 percent increase in productivity and an 80 percent drop in defects. They now only have a skeleton crew of 60 people monitoring screens, where once 650 people were working the floor. Yeah.

**Ren** (2:00)
So that story, it is now quite old. It's almost a decade old. It was like the pilot of this. In the past 10 years, China's density of robots has just exploded alongside their terrible demographic challenge. Their population pyramid is inverted.
China's robot density in 2015 was 49 robots per 10,000 workers.
In 2025, that grew to over 400 per 10,000 workers.

**Bryce** (2:29)
And you mentioned shrinking workforce. By 2035, they planned for robots to handle up to 60% of that lost labor. So pretty significant.

**Ren** (2:38)
And this story starts in China, but it is spreading all over the world. AI for us today is a story of chat bots and agents, things inside our phones and our computers.
But I think for AI to reach its lofty expectations and to justify Nvidia's lofty valuation, this is where the AI story is heading. AI in the physical world.

**Bryce** (3:01)
Yes. Love it. All right. Well, let's start with what the industry looks like today. So we'll start with the AI industry. The global market is worth around $280 billion, covers everything from software, hardware and services.
We're all very familiar with it. It's hard to really miss what's going on in AI at the moment. But if we turn to the robotics industry and drill down a little bit, the global humanoid robot market is valued at roughly $2.9 billion in 2025
Still relatively small.

**Ren** (3:28)
I would say humanoid robots are like the sugar hit of the robotics industry, though. They're like the glossy front cover of the magazine that sells the dream. Yeah. The actual AI driven logistics and industrial robot market was worth over $16.8 billion in 2025 If we drill down just on warehouse robots, that was $6.9 billion in 2024 I mean, if you think about the relative scale of those two industries, robotics just shived $20 billion, global AI just shived $300 billion, but the robotics industry, well both industries are expected to grow very quickly and converge.
Let's talk about where the AI industry is expected to go first. So by 2033, the global AI market is expected to hit $3.5 trillion.

**Bryce** (4:20)
Ten times.

**Ren** (4:22)
Yeah, compound annual growth rate of over 30 percent a year, making it one of the fastest growing industries in modern history. PwC estimate that AI will add $15.7 trillion to global GDP by 2030
That's four years away, more than the combined GDPs of China and India today.

**Bryce** (4:40)
Geez.

**Ren** (4:41)
So that's AI.

**Bryce** (4:42)
Yeah.

**Ren** (4:43)
And then for AI to reach that lofty valuation, part of it is going to be the growth in this robotics market.