San Francisco-based Foundation Future Industries announced this morning that future Phantom humanoid robots would use AMD Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series processors, which the company says are 2.5X faster in inference (thinking) and 3X faster in training when compared to the current king of AI chips, Nvidia.
The battle for AI compute, essentially, has a new front. And this battle, according to a new research report, will be worth $50 billion annually by 2035.
The headline speed claims are what AMD is touting, and they are eye-catching. But they do lack details: benchmark methodology, models, Nvidia chips used for comparison and so on. That said, it’s still a big deal: a company with robots already on the job at customer facilities picked AMD. Nvidia has spent years making itself the default for robotics, from its Jetson edge modules to its Isaac simulation stack, and many robot startups use its technology.
The technical pitch is about more than speed, though. Foundation is leaning on AMD’s FPGAs — reprogrammable chips that excel at the deterministic, low-latency work robots do — to run its hands and sensing.
“With AMD FPGAs, Foundation’s custom hands will actuate and coordinate all 23 degrees of freedom while fusing high-frequency tactile feedback in a single deterministic control loop,” Andrea Esposito, who leads hand development at Foundation, said in a statement.
That adaptive-computing angle is new ground in humanoid robots, and it’s thanks to AMD’s 2022 acquisition of Xilinx, which invented the first FPGA.
That 23-degrees-of-freedom hand is something Foundation co-founder and CEO Sankaet Pathak has been telegraphing for months. In a December interview on my TechFirst podcast, he described a “second-generation hand … a tendon-actuated hand” as the company’s last major hardware hurdle: “the last remaining part of the hardware that needs to be perfected, after which it’s a pure AI and data problem.”
The AMD collaboration is where that hand gets its commands.
AMD is framing the deal as validation of its full-stack approach, an Nvidia strength.
“Advanced humanoid robots require tightly coordinated compute across perception, reasoning and real-time control,” Salil Raje, senior vice president and general manager of AMD Embedded, said in a statement. The collaboration, he said, brings together “AMD AI acceleration, CPU, graphics and adaptive computing technologies to support the complete robotics pipeline.”
Foundation says its robots run 24 hours a day, five days a week in customer deployments, and contributed to more than 24,000 cars built in 2025, earning $100 million in contracted annual recurring revenue. That puts Foundation among a very short list of humanoid robot makers currently generating meaningful recurring revenue from their robots.
The endurance claim isn’t new.
Pathak told me in December that Foundation is “the only company that I’m aware of in the US — a humanoid company — that is doing full three shifts every day,” crediting low-friction actuators that keep the motors from overheating. “The motors do not overheat and don’t need to be turned off, which some of our competitors have as a challenge today.”
That’s impressive: many of the robots that failed in the Beijing humanoid robot marathon earlier this year failed because of overheating actuators.
The soon-to-be-available Phantom MK-2, Foundation says, will be built on AMD from the start and engineered for punishing conditions in both industrial and defense use cases. The MK-2 will offer 100G vibration tolerance, an IP67 waterproof-and-dustproof rating, and 360-degree vision. Foundation, founded only in May 2024, describes itself as the only company building dual-use humanoid robots for both heavy industry and defense.
For now, the robot is doing its own marketing: Phantom is running live demonstrations in the showcase at the center of the Advancing AI expo hall through Thursday.