Amazon Acquires Fauna Robotics. Is This a Viable Threat to Tesla's Optimus Project?
2026-03-29 08:46:00 ET
You read the headline. I'll be direct about the question's answer: No, it's not a threat right now. But the more interesting question is whether Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is building the right foundation to become a threat in three to five years. I think the answer is a qualified and timid yes.
Amazon confirmed the acquisition of Fauna Robotics this week. Fauna is a two-year-old New York start-up founded by former Meta Platforms and Google engineers, specifically Josh Merel, a Google DeepMind researcher, and Rob Cochran, former head of product at CTRL-Labs, the neural interface company Meta absorbed in 2019.
Their product is Sprout: a 42-inch, 50-pound bipedal humanoid that runs on Nvidia 's Jetson Orin platform, has a swappable battery lasting about three hours, and is priced at $50,000 for research and development partners.
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