IDC expects about 25,000 dexterous hands to ship in 2026, more than 85% of them from Chinese makers

About 25,000 dexterous hands will ship worldwide in 2026, IDC forecast in a report published on Nov. 9, and Chinese makers will account for more than 85% of them. The count leaves out hands that companies build for their own robots, so it measures the merchant market: hands sold to someone else. For scale, IDC counted close to 25,000 humanoids shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026 alone, so a full year of merchant hands matches about half a year of the robots that might carry them.

Who buys them is the telling part. IDC names three main sources of demand: humanoid makers fitting hands to their robots, research and education, and embodied-AI model development and data collection. Manufacturing and logistics are still at the stage of exploring what hands can do, the report says, and for fixed parts, repetitive work and tight cycle times a conventional gripper is often simpler, cheaper and easier to maintain.

That makes China's share a lead in supplying robot labs and data-collection floors. IDC expects the next three years to turn on engineering rather than specs: tactile sensing, reliability, consistency and maintenance cost matter more than degrees of freedom, and four drive designs (tendon, direct drive, linkage and hybrid) will keep competing.