Humanoid robots are very hyped these days. They are performing ever more impressive feats, from pulling off coordinated dance performances to running half-marathons. Yet one investor believes that the robots ultimately winning the commercial race will be the “boring” ones with solid, real-world market potential.

Merck did not begin in a laboratory, but in a neighborhood pharmacy that still opens every day to fill prescriptions for local residents. The Engel Pharmacy in central Darmstadt, Germany, founded in 1668, has operated for 358 years and is the company’s starting point.

SmartSens is signaling stronger first-half 2026 growth, a development that may matter to investors tracking global demand for image sensors used in security cameras, smartphones, and vehicles. The company said revenue and profit are likely to rise, reflecting broader adoption of AI-driven hardware across consumer and industrial markets worldwide.

The humanoid robot industry is converging on a “big brain, small brain” architecture, with AI compute shifting from the cloud to the edge, and even to hands, feet, and other endpoints. DIGITIMES Intelligence predicts that Nvidia’s CUDA will keep it dominant in the robot “big brain” layer for now, but automotive chipmakers and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) vendors can still target the “small brain” and endpoint edge-compute market to break into the humanoid robot ecosystem.

AI development is driving larger data transfers and higher GPU efficiency demands, pushing memory toward customization and prompting South Korean industry watchers to call for a shift to a “memory foundry” model. Sungkyunkwan University professor Seokjoon Kwon said at the Nano Korea 2026 forum that memory makers must move from mass production to order-driven design tailored to customer needs.

The competitive race to dominate artificial intelligence is driving technology giants to over-build computing capacity by roughly half again more than is economically efficient — and the same contest, financed with debt and circular equity ties, is quietly manufacturing the conditions for a sector-wide bust. That is the central argument of a new Bank for International Settlements (BIS) working paper that puts formal numbers on a warning the institution has been sounding for weeks.