North American companies ordered 8,940 industrial robots worth $622 million in the second quarter, according to data the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) released on August 11. Units were up 4.3% year over year, revenue up 21.3%. First-half totals came to 17,995 units worth $1.166 billion, up 2.0% and 6.6% respectively over the first half of 2025.
Auto is pulling back; nearly everyone else is stepping in
The total tells you less than the mix. Automotive OEM orders fell 25% year over year in the first half, the single biggest drag on the market. Almost every other sector offset it: semiconductor and electronics/photonics orders rose 35%, life sciences/pharma/biomed rose 32%, automotive components rose 24%, food and consumer goods rose 17%, plastics and rubber and the “all other” category each rose 6%, and metals rose 3%.
The quarterly numbers show the same shift, sharper. Semi and electronics grew 38% year over year in Q2 alone, automotive components 20%, food/consumer goods and metals both 18%, life sciences 9%. Non-automotive customers accounted for 56% of units ordered in the quarter. The sector that used to define the robotics market isn’t the biggest buyer of robots anymore.
Collaborative robots kept growing too: 2,774 cobots worth $114 million in the first half, 15.4% of all units. Cobots made up 43.7% of life sciences orders and 36.5% of semiconductor orders, both well above the market average. “The first half of 2026 shows how the mix of the robotics market continues to evolve,” said A3 executive vice president Alex Shikany. “Automotive remains an important driver of demand, while we’re also seeing growth across a wider range of industries.”
Flat at the top line, wider underneath
We covered A3’s full-year 2025 figures in June: 36,766 robots ordered across North America, worth $2.25 billion. Humanoid supply was outrunning demand at the time, and industrial-arm orders were the steadier backdrop to that story. Annualize the first half’s 17,995 units and 2026 lands close to 36,000, roughly flat against 2025 and nowhere near a breakout year.
The flat total hides the real move: automotive lost a quarter of its order volume, and semiconductor, pharma, and food picked up almost exactly what auto gave back. Industrial robots are no longer primarily a car-plant tool; they’re becoming a default line item across a wider set of factories. Manufacturing PMI has stayed in expansion for six straight months through June, and Federal Reserve data shows manufacturing output 1.1% above its year-earlier level. Automation spending is holding up as a long-term bet even with the broader economy uncertain, not something companies are waiting on a recovery to fund.
Which jobs this points at
Semiconductor, pharma, and food are the three sectors posting the fastest order growth, and all three trailed automotive on robot penetration for years; they’re catching up now. Life sciences’ 43.7% cobot share is the tell: that industry isn’t buying large welding arms, it’s buying mid-size machines built to work alongside people, and those tend to displace repetitive sorting, quality-check, and material-handling roles first, not judgment-heavy lab work. The 17-18% growth in food and consumer goods maps to packaging and sortation jobs. Automotive component suppliers, up 24% even as OEMs pull back, show that the upstream automotive supply chain isn’t getting a reprieve. The pressure is shifting one tier back, not disappearing.
