AMD to supply chips for Foundation's defence-linked humanoid robots
AMD has struck a deal to power Foundation's dual-use humanoid robots, a move that pits the US chipmaker against Nvidia in a market crucial to Europe's manufacturing and defence sectors.
AMD will supply processors for Foundation’s humanoid robots under a deal announced on July 23. The San Francisco startup will run its machines on AMD’s Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series processors as it seeks to scale production for both factory floors and the battlefield.
Foundation is not a typical robotics firm. Its Phantom machines have undergone testing in Ukraine and the company holds Pentagon contracts, positioning it in the dual-use space where industrial manufacturing meets military logistics. The startup claims to be the only company building humanoids explicitly for both heavy industry and defence.
The company's rapid ascent has drawn scrutiny. Eric Trump has been an investor since early 2026 and serves as chief strategy adviser. He and his brother Donald Trump Jr. have backed several defence and hardware firms, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest as those companies compete for government contracts while a family member occupies the White House.
For European manufacturers, Foundation’s trajectory is worth watching. Its first-generation robots helped build more than 24,000 cars in 2025 and now operate five days a week. The company holds $100 million in contracted annual recurring revenue.
It leases industrial units for roughly $100,000 a year, while defence versions cost $300,000 apiece. A factory opening in October will produce 5,000 robots annually, with a second site planned to build 50,000.
The battle for robotics silicon
The partnership is a deliberate strike against Nvidia, which dominates robotics through its Jetson edge modules and Isaac simulation software. Foundation’s Phantom MK-2 is engineered around AMD silicon, hardened to tolerate 100G of vibration, carry an IP67 dust and water rating, and see in 360 degrees.
According to Foundation’s Andrea Esposito, AMD’s programmable FPGA chips allow the robot to coordinate 23 degrees of freedom with tactile feedback in "a single deterministic control loop".
AMD claims its chip delivers 2.5 times faster inference and three times faster training than Nvidia’s, though it has not published the underlying benchmarks. "Advanced humanoid robots require tightly coordinated compute across perception, reasoning and real-time control," said AMD senior vice-president Salil Raje.
For Europe’s industrial economy, the deal signals that the battle for robotics infrastructure is intensifying. Germany’s NEURA Robotics recently secured $1.4 billion in funding, while Chinese manufacturers face a commercialisation reckoning. AMD’s wager is that a defence-connected US firm will give it the edge in a global market that European factories are rapidly adopting.
