Carmakers stop being the point: for the first time non-automotive plants order most of North America's robots

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3), which collects order data from robot suppliers in the United States, Canada and Mexico, reports that North American companies ordered 8,940 robots worth $622 million in the second quarter of 2026. Against the same quarter of 2025 that is 4.3% more machines and 21.3% more money — a gap which says that the robots being bought are more expensive ones. The more interesting number is who is buying. Non-automotive industries accounted for 55.9% of units ordered in the quarter. Across the first half of the year semiconductors, electronics and photonics ordered 35% more robots than a year earlier, life sciences and pharmaceuticals 32% more, automotive component makers 24% more and food and consumer goods 17% more. Car manufacturers themselves — the industry that built the robotics market and has dominated its statistics for four decades — ordered 25% fewer. "The breadth of growth outside automotive OEM is an important trend we'll continue to watch," said Alex Shikany, executive vice president of A3. Collaborative robots, the lighter machines meant to work next to people rather than behind a fence, took 2,774 of the units ordered in the first half and $114 million — 15.4% of units but only 9.8% of the money. Healthcare accounted for 43.7% of cobot orders and electronics for 36.5%. For the first half as a whole the figures are flatter: 17,995 robots worth $1.166 billion, 2.0% more units and 6.6% more revenue year on year. The data covers orders placed with suppliers, not installations, and only the North American market.