Which country has the most robots?

The two medals measure different things and shouldn't be mixed. The stock and absolute installations belong to China by a landslide: more new robots per year than the rest of the world combined, the consequence of two decades of treating automation as industrial policy. Robot density corrects for size instead: there South Korea has led the world for years, with the planet's most automated industry per worker, followed at a distance by Singapore, Germany and Japan.

For the reader, the Chinese figure explains something very concrete: why your next robot (the vacuum, the server, the humanoid) will probably speak factory Chinese. Industrial scale is what makes every motor and sensor cheaper, and it is the story we tell in the night China took its robots dancing: the show lasted one night, the supply chain has been rehearsing for twenty years.