At Faraday Future’s California robotics site, the welcome comes from a robot dog.
“He is just trying to say hi,” Jerry Wang, the company’s global executive chairman, said in an interview there in September as one trotted over. “He’s trying to be friendly.”
Visitors are welcome to pet it. “Yeah, of course. 100%,” he said.
Wang has been at Faraday Future since the start, about 15 years. “I do all of the fundraising for this company,” he said.
He took it public in 2021. Now he is raising money for something new: robots.
Less than a year after it began selling them, Faraday Future has 24 robots on the market, all certified by the FCC, and had shipped 552 by the end of August.
On Sept. 28, it agreed to fold the robot business into FF EAI Robotics Ecosystem, a Nasdaq company it controls that now trades as FFR, at a valuation of about $200 million. It also plans a U.S. robot factory by the end of this year and says it will invest “no less than $5 billion in the United States” over the next decade, its August roadmap indicated.
Faraday Future hasn’t said how it will fund that pledge.
Why an EV company is betting on robots
That raises the obvious question for a car company. Faraday Future put about $3 billion into its electric-car business over nine years, by its own count in a 2023 letter to stockholders.
Asked what it costs to build cars, Wang was blunt. “Tremendously expensive,” he said.
He sees Faraday Future as one of the few that survived. “The survivors are only four, Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and Faraday,” he said. “Taking Faraday aside, each of them invested approximately $20 billion or more.”
Robots, he said, have been a different experience from day one. “We enter[ed] into the robotic business around like half a year ago,” he said. “We’re making money on hardware, which is very difficult.”
The unit ran a gross margin of about 30.9% in the second quarter, the company said. “The monthly delivery numbers are higher and higher month by month,” Wang added.
That is why the whole company is being rebuilt around them. Faraday Future plans to become a physical AI holding company, it said on Sept. 29, with FFR as the first public company it has incubated.
“We kind of upgrade[d] our strategy into a physical AI ecosystem company,” Wang said. “The first and the most important as of now is the robotic products.”
Faraday Future touts one AI brain with many robot bodies
Faraday Future’s greeter dog is the cheapest product, at $1,990. “For the smaller one, which is this baby here, this is mainly for education,” Wang said.
The bigger dogs are built for home security. They patrol a yard at night, recognize family members by face, and sound a siren and alert the police if a stranger keeps coming.
As for how strong they are, Wang found out the hard way, letting one run into his leg at roughly a tenth of its power. “It feels really painful,” he said. “I do not recommend.”
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A camera roaming someone’s house all day raises the question of where the footage goes. “We take lots of attention to the user’s privacy,” he said. “We do not collect privacy data.” Without the owner’s consent, he said, the company has no access to it.
The humanoids standing nearby already work stage shows, hotel lobbies, and university labs. “Those two can dance much better than I’m able to do for now,” he said.
Faraday Future is betting that one AI “brain” can run all of these bodies, unlike Figure AI and Agility Robotics, which the company said builds a single form to do everything.
Each robot collects data that trains that brain, and outside developers can sell skills, like apps, for it. “We try to create a flywheel and continue to build the ecosystem. It’s similar to Tesla[‘s] strategy, right?” Wang said.
The company builds on existing AI models rather than making its own, because “this would take you like billions of dollars if not [a] trillion.”
Less than a year after it began selling them, Faraday Future has 24 robots on the market.
Faraday pushes U.S. manufacturing and new FFR stock
Today, Faraday Future relies on Chinese manufacturers for its robots, according to its own risk disclosures. The U.S. program is meant to change that.
Its first two U.S. products, the Next Futurist humanoid and the Next Aegis quadruped, are targeted to come off an American line in the first quarter of 2027, with batteries and circuit boards next to move onshore.
Wang expects scale to bring prices down fast. “The cost is relatively high right now,” he said, but “in 10 years it will be significantly reduced.”
For investors, Faraday Future will remain FFR’s controlling shareholder and can’t sell its new shares for 18 months. Existing FFR holders may get a special stock dividend when the deal closes.
Because Faraday Future controls FFR, independent directors on FFR’s board must sign off after a fairness opinion, and stockholders must still vote.
Management projects robot revenue of about $7.1 million this year and $45.17 million in 2027, with gross margin climbing to about 54% by 2030, though the numbers aren’t formal guidance.
The projections come from management, and both companies’ filings warn of substantial doubt about their ability to continue as going concerns, so the robot business will need more financing to hit them.
“We’re still a small company compared to like Figure or Tesla,” Wang said.
A world with more robots than people?
Asked what all of this looks like in 15 years, Wang was upbeat. “I’m very optimistic about the world,” he said. He pictures robots taking over chores such as making beds, cleaning, and cooking.
Will a Starbucks someday have more robots than people? “Maybe,” he said. “Not specifically for Starbucks because in 10 to 15 years I’m not even sure how the store will look.”
“In my opinion, in 10 years or so, there will be more robotic devices compared to human beings.”
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