Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Optimus is supposed to be the iPhone of humanoid robots, but Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) has now rolled out the Android.

CEO Jensen Huang unveiled Isaac GR00T at GTC Taipei on Monday, an open development platform that hands every Optimus rival a unified software stack and a reference robot to run it on.

The logic is simple.

Every humanoid built on GR00T runs on Nvidia silicon, while Tesla’s closed Optimus stack does not. Arming Tesla’s competitors means Nvidia gets a cut of every robot that ships outside Fremont.

Inside Nvidia’s Geopolitical Hybrid

GR00T’s body comes from Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics, the tactile hands from Singapore’s Sharpa Wave, and the brain runs on Nvidia’s U.S.-designed Jetson Thor processor and Blackwell GPU.

The high-margin compute stays American while the motors and metal are outsourced to Asia, effectively insulating Nvidia’s core IP from escalating chip export restrictions.

Initial platform adopters include Stanford University, ETH Zurich, UC San Diego, and Ai2.

OpenAI Piles On The Pressure

Sam Altman has restarted OpenAI’s robotics ambitions five years after shutting the team down, recruiting actuator, electrical, and 3D printing engineers at base salaries up to $310,000.

Tesla shed roughly $75 billion in market cap on Monday, with shares closing 4.6% lower.

Prediction market traders had turned skeptical on Optimus well before Monday.

Both Polymarket and Kalshi traders give the robot just a 14% chance of being released to the public by year-end.

Tesla ended production of the Model S and Model X, the cars that built the modern company, to convert the Fremont line into Optimus assembly. Musk has said the robot may eventually account for 80% of Tesla’s value.

Unitree Is Already Making Money

Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, generating revenue of 1.7 billion yuan, or around $250 million, according to its IPO prospectus.

The company is targeting a STAR Market IPO to raise $620 million at an initial market capitalization of at least $6.2 billion.

The Chinese firm is also one of the only humanoid makers actually profitable, posting a net profit of 278 million yuan, or $41 million, in 2025.

For Nvidia, GR00T extends the CUDA playbook into a new vertical. For Tesla, the bet that vertical integration wins humanoid robotics may have just gotten harder to defend.

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