The robots that move 90 percent of global trade do not have legs, faces, or names. They are 100-foot ship-to-shore cranes that pick 50-ton steel containers off the deck of a vessel the length of four American football fields and place them on autonomous battery-electric trucks that drive themselves to stacks of other containers managed by autonomous stacking cranes operating in a yard the size of a small city. The whole choreography happens at the Port of Rotterdam with 10 to 15 humans per shift moving 14 million containers per year, at the Port of Singapore’s new Tuas Mega Port — designed to handle 36 million TEUs at full build-out by the 2040s — with electric autonomous guided vehicles that emit zero carbon and run on an AI-orchestrated fleet management system, and at Yangshan Deepwater Port in Shanghai with what is now generally regarded as the most heavily automated container terminal on Earth. The global market for automated container terminal equipment was $11.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $22.4 billion by 2035. Roughly 80 percent of the ship-to-shore cranes currently operating at U.S. ports were built by a single Chinese state-owned manufacturer. None of this gets the coverage that a humanoid robot doing a backflip gets. All of it is doing significantly more economic work.
The same applies underwater, where Anduril Industries’ Quonset Point, Rhode Island factory is being scaled up to produce up to 200 Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicles per year alongside larger Dive-XL mothership platforms in Sydney, Australia, with the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Navy committing multi-year contracts to the buildout. And on the surface, where the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative is buying autonomous surface vessels and undersea vehicles by the hundreds rather than the dozens for the first time in the post-WWII history of American naval procurement. And in the salmon pens off the coast of Norway, where 1.4 billion farmed Atlantic salmon are being monitored, fed, deloused, and harvested by an emerging stack of underwater robotics that includes Tidal — an Alphabet X spin-off — and AKVA Group’s submerged-cage Nautilus system that has cut sea lice treatments by an order of magnitude.
Three subdomains. Three different sets of acronyms. One underlying observation: the maritime sector is where the most consequential robotics deployment is happening, and the companies that get the headlines for humanoid robots are not, with rare exception, the same companies that are doing the work.
The container port and the ZPMC problem
A modern container terminal is built around three families of equipment, all of which can be automated and most of which already are. The ship-to-shore (STS) crane lifts the box off the vessel onto the dock — at the largest ports, the new generation of “double-trolley” STS cranes can lift two containers simultaneously and operate without a human in the cab. The automated stacking crane (ASC) moves containers within the storage yard. And the automated guided vehicle (AGV) — a battery-electric, GPS-guided platform with no driver — transports the container between the STS crane and the ASC stack. Singapore’s Tuas Mega Port runs the whole sequence on AI-orchestrated AGV fleets with 50 percent lower carbon emissions than diesel terminal trucks. Rotterdam’s Maasvlakte II has been operating versions of this stack since 2014. Yangshan Phase IV in Shanghai opened in 2017 as the world’s largest automated container terminal at the time. Long Beach Container Terminal in California runs partial automation — quay cranes still manned, but yard operations largely automated — and has been the source of running disputes with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) that has shaped American labor politics around the technology in ways that the Asian operators have not had to navigate.
The dominant supplier of the heavy equipment is Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries — ZPMC — a state-owned Chinese manufacturer controlled by China Communications Construction Company. ZPMC built around 80 percent of the ship-to-shore cranes currently operating at U.S. ports and roughly 70 percent of the cranes operating worldwide. A single ZPMC STS crane costs $10 to $15 million and the company can underprice every Western competitor because it does not face the same profit pressure as a publicly traded engineering firm. Finland’s Konecranes is the only meaningful Western alternative for new STS crane purchases. There is no domestic American manufacturer of ship-to-shore cranes at all. The U.S. Navy, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have publicly stated that they consider ZPMC equipment a potential vector for cyber-intrusion into U.S. port infrastructure, with cellular modems and other communications hardware embedded in the cranes that the Pentagon has reportedly compared to “a Trojan horse.” The Biden administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on Chinese-made STS cranes in 2024. On October 14, 2025, the second Trump administration’s U.S. Trade Representative finalized an additional 100 percent tariff on the same equipment, effective November 9, 2025, with a carve-out for cranes contracted before April 17, 2025 and delivered before April 18, 2027. ZPMC publicly warned in May 2025 that the tariff would “cripple U.S. ports.”
This is the civilian-military-fusion model the Chinese state has refined for decades applied to the equipment that loads every container of every product that arrives in the United States by sea. ZPMC’s parent, China Communications Construction Company, is sanctioned by multiple U.S. federal agencies for work on artificial islands in the South China Sea. The same company sells cranes to U.S. ports. The cranes contain electronic components — modems, sensors, controllers — that originate in the same Chinese supply chain the U.S. is simultaneously trying to decouple from in semiconductors and in critical metals like gallium and germanium, and that the United Front Work Department playbook has been steering through civilian commercial channels into U.S. critical infrastructure for years.
The American port industry is, structurally, asking the federal government a hard question with no good answer: if Chinese cranes are a national security risk, and no American manufacturer makes them, and the European alternatives can’t scale fast enough, and the next decade of container vessel growth requires new cranes — where exactly do the cranes come from? Konecranes is expanding. American startups are talking about entering the market. The Port of Virginia is asking for a 12-month phase-in. The cranes are still being ordered from ZPMC under the pre-April 17 carve-out. The infrastructure dependency turns out to be the kind of legacy commitment that is much easier to enter than to exit — and the alternative, which is to build a domestic crane industry from scratch over 5 to 10 years, costs more money than anybody is currently willing to commit and produces no political payoff before the next election.
In the meantime, the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction. China’s three-step plan to dominate the maritime sector targets becoming a global innovation hub by 2025 and the world’s leading maritime power by 2035. Seven of the top 10 busiest container ports on Earth are Chinese. Yangshan Port is roughly 50 percent more productive than Rotterdam on every productivity metric available. The Port of Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia signed a deal in February 2025 to buy 58 ZPMC rubber-tired gantry cranes. Beyond the United States, the question is not whether to build with ZPMC. The question is how fast.
The undersea drone economy
Above water, the defense robotics buildout has happened in the open — Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Figure, the humanoid roundup. Below water, the same buildout has happened more quietly, on contract numbers that dwarf the consumer-facing announcements. The U.S. Navy operates Unmanned Undersea Vehicle Squadron 1 (UUVRON-1) out of Keyport, Washington — one of two Navy squadrons whose entire mission is to develop, test, and deploy underwater drones. On April 5, 2025, Anduril delivered the first Dive-LD to UUVRON-1: a 6-meter-long autonomous undersea vehicle capable of operating at depths up to 6,000 meters, with 10-day endurance, modular payloads, and a 3D-printed hull design that allows production rates the legacy submarine industry cannot match. In August 2024, the Pentagon selected the Dive-LD as part of the second tranche of the Replicator initiative — a program designed to mass-produce autonomous systems in the thousands to deter Chinese military expansion in the Indo-Pacific. In March 2026, the Navy selected Anduril’s larger Dive-XL for the CAMP program, which positions the platform as an underwater “mothership” that can carry and launch smaller undersea drones, including the company’s torpedo-launchable Copperhead — a sub-class platform unveiled at Sea Air Space 2025 in two variants (Copperhead-100 and Copperhead-500) that fit inside Dive-XL’s payload bay the way a fighter jet’s missiles fit inside its weapons bay.
The undersea robotics industry is, in operational terms, a generation older than the humanoid robotics industry. Commercial remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) have been doing oil-and-gas inspection at depths up to 4,000 meters since the 1980s. Companies like Oceaneering, Subsea7, Saipem, and TechnipFMC have been operating ROV fleets for decades. The 2025-2026 shift is from human-piloted ROVs tethered to a surface vessel to genuinely autonomous autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that can operate untethered for days at a time, executing pre-programmed missions and adapting to conditions on the fly without continuous human oversight. The technology that makes that shift possible is the same family of perception and autonomy software that has enabled the autonomous weapons buildout above water, the same machine-vision pipelines that are enabling autonomous spray drones on farms and autonomous Spot platforms in defense procurement. The water makes the engineering harder. The hardware is more expensive. The acoustic communications channels are vastly narrower than the radio spectrum available to surface drones. But the fundamental capability — perceive environment, plan action, execute, repeat without supervision — is the same.
Saildrone, the Alameda-based company founded by Richard Jenkins, is the surface-vessel equivalent. Saildrone’s autonomous Voyager USV — a 33-foot wind-and-solar-powered sailing platform — has been used by the U.S. Navy, NOAA, and a dozen other government and commercial customers for missions ranging from hurricane data collection to maritime domain awareness in the Pacific. The company is now adapting the platform into a long-endurance anti-submarine warfare platform that can patrol contested ocean for months at a time at a fraction of the cost of a frigate. Anduril’s Ghost Shark, an extra-large AUV produced under contract with the Royal Australian Navy, delivered its first operational platform in 2025 and is being scaled up at a Sydney production facility. Turkey’s Sefine ULAQ USV is in service with the Turkish Navy. The Ukrainian Navy’s Magura V5 and Sea Baby unmanned surface vessels have, in the course of the war in the Black Sea, sunk or damaged more Russian naval tonnage than any other category of weapon since 2022 — using vessels that cost roughly $250,000 each, packed with explosives, and steered toward Russian warships by operators sitting in Kyiv. The cost-asymmetry logic that drove loitering munitions in Ukraine has now translated, in nearly identical form, to the maritime domain.
What this means in 2026 is that the undersea environment, which for most of human history has been the domain of nation-state navies operating expensive manned submarines, is becoming a contested space where companies like Anduril, Saildrone, and L3Harris can produce hundreds of autonomous vessels per year at unit costs that any country with a reasonable defense budget can afford to buy in volume. AUKUS — the Australia-UK-US security partnership announced in 2021 — explicitly identifies autonomous undersea systems as a Pillar Two technology priority, alongside the nuclear-powered submarines at the center of the agreement. The Pacific deterrent posture the United States is building against the Chinese navy depends, increasingly, not on the dwindling number of attack submarines the U.S. Navy can deploy, but on the rapidly increasing number of autonomous underwater drones it can manufacture in Quonset Point and Sydney.
The salmon farm running itself
Norway produces more than 1.4 million tons of farmed Atlantic salmon annually, which is roughly half of the global supply and represents 73 percent of Norway’s seafood export revenue. The industry is concentrated along the Norwegian coastline in tens of thousands of submerged net pens, each one holding up to 200,000 salmon. The single largest operational problem facing the industry is sea lice — a parasitic copepod that attaches to the skin of farmed salmon, causes welfare problems, reduces growth rates, and triggers regulatory penalties when infestation thresholds are exceeded. Manual sea-lice removal — done by lifting the fish out of the water, hot-water bathing them, or applying chemicals — is stressful for the salmon, hazardous for the workers, and expensive for the producer. The Norwegian salmon industry spends an estimated $700 million per year on sea-lice mitigation.
Underwater robotics has become the operational backbone of how that mitigation now happens. Stingray Marine Solutions, a Norwegian startup, operates underwater drones equipped with computer vision and surgical diode lasers that detect a sea louse on a passing salmon and kill the parasite with a 100-millisecond laser pulse — without lifting the fish, without applying chemicals, without manual intervention. Tidal, a spin-off from Google X — the same Alphabet moonshot factory that produced the autonomous-driving company Waymo and the geothermal start-up Dandelion — launched Tidal Lice Control at the AquaNor 2025 trade show in Trondheim. The system is an AI-driven autonomous platform that operates inside salmon pens around the clock, detecting and neutralizing lice without manual handling. AKVA Group, the largest publicly traded aquaculture technology company, has commercialized Nautilus — a deep-farming solution where the salmon are kept in submerged net pens with a surface air dome for swim-bladder access, and where data from six commercial sites shows 0.6 delousing operations per pen versus 6.1 at conventional surface sites. Remora Robotics of Stavanger has built fully autonomous net-cleaning and inspection robots that operate continuously inside the pens, preventing biofouling without the high-pressure cleaning that stresses the fish.
The underwater drone fleet inside a 2026-vintage Norwegian salmon operation is, in scale terms, larger than the surface drone fleet at the average mid-sized agricultural operation in the American Midwest. Deep Trekker, a Canadian ROV manufacturer, has hundreds of small inspection ROVs operating in Norwegian fish farms doing everything from sea-lice counting to net inspection to monitoring lumpfish — a cleaner-fish species that aquaculture operators stock in pens specifically to eat sea lice off the salmon as a biological alternative to chemical or laser intervention. Aquaai, a San Diego startup, has deployed robotic fish — actual computer-vision-equipped artificial salmon that swim alongside the real ones — to provide non-intrusive monitoring inside cages with up to 188,000 individuals. The same fundamental observation from Japanese elder-care robotics applies here in mirror-image form: the robots that work in the field are the ones that solve a discrete, well-defined problem (sea lice detection, net cleaning, individual fish health monitoring) — not the ones that try to replace the entire labor pool with a single general-purpose machine.
What the Norwegian aquaculture industry has built over the last decade is, in operational terms, the closed-loop precision agriculture pattern applied underwater: scout robots gather data, AI processes the data into prescriptions, action robots execute the prescriptions, results are measured by the scout robots in the next cycle. The same architecture that runs autonomous DJI Agras spray drones over Brazilian soybean fields is running underwater laser-equipped sea-lice killers in Norwegian fjords, and the productivity gains are comparable. The 2025 Norwegian parliament debates on biomass limits and welfare measures are happening inside a regulatory environment that explicitly assumes a high-automation production model — the alternative, which is a return to chemical delousing and manual net cleaning, is no longer politically or environmentally viable, which means the industry is locked into the robotics path whether individual operators prefer it or not.
The autonomous ship that almost works
One last piece. The Yara Birkeland, an 80-meter, 120-TEU, fully battery-powered container ship operated by the Norwegian agricultural-chemical company Yara International, has been operating commercially in Norwegian coastal waters since 2022. It is the world’s first commercial-operation autonomous container vessel. It can self-dock, self-cross, and self-discharge. It eliminates an estimated 40,000 diesel truck journeys per year. And it still operates with a crew of three onboard — recently reduced from a larger initial complement — supervising the autonomous systems for regulatory reasons that have nothing to do with whether the autonomy actually works. The two-year autonomy trial period that was originally supposed to conclude in late 2024 has been extended. The shore-based remote operations center in Horten is fully built and operational. The vessel is functionally autonomous and operationally crewed. The same gap between technical capability and regulatory permission that holds back drone delivery in 2026 holds back autonomous shipping, in the same shape and roughly the same proportions, with the same set of insurers, regulators, and labor unions deciding the pace of the rollout.
The Mayflower Autonomous Ship, developed by ProMare and IBM and capable of crossing the Atlantic without a crew, made its maiden voyage in 2022. The Sea Hunter, DARPA’s anti-submarine warfare USV, has been in continuous Navy operation since 2018. Hyundai Heavy Industries, Maersk, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, and most of the world’s major shipowners have active autonomous-vessel research programs. Nothing about the technology is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the same regulatory, insurance, and labor-relations question that defines every other domain where robots are entering the workforce: who carries the liability when something goes wrong, who pays the unemployment claim when the workers are displaced, and which government agency owns the certification authority that determines whether the autonomous system is allowed to operate.
What 2026 actually looks like across the maritime sector
A container ship leaves Yangshan in Shanghai loaded by a ZPMC-built crane onto a vessel managed by a Chinese-owned shipping line, sails the Pacific monitored by a fleet of Saildrone Voyager USVs collecting maritime domain awareness data for the U.S. Navy and the Anduril Dive-LD autonomous undersea vehicles operating below the surface in patterns that the People’s Liberation Army Navy cannot fully observe, arrives at the Port of Long Beach where a partially automated terminal moves the containers off the vessel using cranes built by ZPMC, transferred to autonomous battery-electric AGVs that run on the same kind of copper-dense electric drivetrain that powers every other large-scale electrification project on the planet — and is then loaded onto the same diesel trucks that have been carrying containers out of American ports since the 1950s, because the last-mile logistics of the surface freight network is the part of the chain where automation is happening slowest, in the same operational pattern visible at every robotics-adoption frontier. Up the coast in Norway, in a salmon pen that holds 200,000 individuals, an autonomous Stingray laser drone is killing sea lice at a rate of one parasite per 100 milliseconds while a Remora Robotics net cleaner does its scheduled biofouling sweep and a Deep Trekker ROV runs an opportunistic inspection of the cage perimeter — and the entire operation is overseen by two technicians sitting in a control room in Trondheim, supervising 17 sea-cage installations across the Norwegian coast simultaneously, in a working pattern that resembles the supervisory model that healthcare robots have begun to enable in American hospitals and that no humanoid robot manufacturer has yet operationalized at scale.
The robots in maritime do not look like robots. They look like cranes, like submersibles, like sailing platforms, like fish. They do not perform on stage. They move 90 percent of global trade, they patrol the ocean floor under contracts the public never sees, and they keep half the world’s farmed salmon alive long enough to reach a refrigerator. They are the deployment side of the same industry whose humanoid demos generate the headlines, and they are doing the work the headlines describe — quietly, in volume, in a working economy that depends on them more completely each year, and that, in 2026, is being reshaped by a U.S.-China trade fight over port cranes, a Pentagon scaleup of undersea drone manufacturing, and a Norwegian aquaculture industry that has built the world’s most heavily automated food production system on the back of a copepod the size of a grain of rice that nobody outside the salmon business has ever heard of.
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