Robotics essentials: HUMANOID ROBOT COST Ask what makes a humanoid expensive and the instinct's answer is the AI. It isn't. On a Unitree G1 teardown, the entire compute stack, the chip the robot thinks with, is about 3% of the bill of materials. The joints are 66%. Actuators run half to two-thirds of what a humanoid costs to build: motor, gearbox, encoder, thirty-odd times over. Hands are the next lump, roughly a fifth on their own, which is why so many robots ship with a claw. Sensors and battery are rounding errors beside the motors. The cost curve is falling faster than the people modelling it expected. Goldman penciled in 15 to 20% a year. It fell 40% in a single year, and they pulled their consumer forecast forward by two to four years. This is no longer a projection: Unitree's IPO filing shows its average humanoid selling price dropping from about $85,000 in 2023 to about $25,000 last year, at a 63% gross margin. A G1 lists at $13,500 today. The R1 is $5,900. The reason is a supply chain, and it is in one country. Morgan Stanley priced the same Optimus two ways: about $46,000 built with Chinese components, about $131,000 without. Roughly triple. China holds around 63% of the world's supply of the mechanical parts, the motors, the reducers, the screws. Every high-torque joint needs a magnet, and every good magnet needs dysprosium and terbium. China's export controls on exactly those elements have been in force since April 2025, and the truce covering the rest expires in November.