Anvil China Plus One Strategy
Mike Xia, CEO of Anvil Robotics, on humanoid vs. non-humanoid robots
China plus one is not a sourcing slogan here, it is the backbone of Anvil’s product strategy. The company is trying to bundle demand from many small robotics teams, then use that pooled order flow to convince suppliers in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to build actuator and sensor capacity that can compete with China on speed, price, and performance. That makes supply chain diversification part of the product, not just a procurement preference.
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Anvil picked Taiwan as its hardware base because core robot parts still lean heavily on China, especially actuators, batteries, sensors, and cameras. The immediate reality is partial dependence, while the commercial goal is to shift one component category at a time toward non Chinese suppliers.
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The bottleneck is not just finding alternate factories. A supplier in Taiwan or Japan will not tool up for a new actuator line unless someone can guarantee real downstream volume for the next 12 months. Anvil’s developer first model works as a demand aggregator that lowers that risk.
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This creates a different position from humanoid robot makers like Figure, Apptronik, Agility, and Foundation, which compete on deploying full robots into factories. Anvil is selling picks and shovels into the robotics stack, and one advantage is offering a China plus one path for teams that need hardware outside mainland China.
If physical AI keeps moving from lab prototypes to deployed fleets, supply chain orchestration will matter more, not less. The winners will not just train better models, they will secure repeatable access to motors, sensors, and assembly partners outside a single country, which gives Anvil room to become infrastructure for the broader robotics ecosystem.