This Is Why America Can’t Have Robots And Other Nice Things

Westmag and Atlas Motion Systems are here to fix the actuator crisis

At a hardware happy hour in the Mission — I dragged our social media editor Armaan along, half-expecting to be the only woman there — I met a different kind of tech bro. You know the usual kind: young, in either a startup t-shirt or, for the more elevated type, Carhartt. He’ll tell you about his agentic recruiting startup (YC W25) and a Big Sur retreat he did with a friend of a friend of Peter Thiel. I didn’t find that poor chump here.

Hardware nerds, I’ve decided, are my favorite kind. Humble, maybe because building physical things stomps the ego out of you. They always bring their latest gadget and like to twiddle with their laser-cut objects as if they were fidgets for this tactile brand of engineers. Tell people in this crowd you’re interested in actuators and the reaction is near-unanimous: a quiet, excited yessss. That’s the magic word. Actuators — and for extra zest, American-made actuators. Watch a party-goer set down his imported beer and lean in.

“I love actuators,” one founder at the party said in earnest. He runs a robot arm company and had just learned that Westmag cofounder David Hansen bought one of his machines. “What are you going to do with it?” he asked. “Tear it down,” Hansen said, to get at the precious actuators inside.

WESTMAG IS not a merch store, but they’re likely to send you t-shirts if you say the magic word. It’s a startup that makes electric motors and actuators right here in the U.S. of A. Its main office is in South San Francisco, known as the Industrial City, a neighborhood dotted with bland, one-story office buildings and piles of rusted rebar. Semi-trucks slug their way from the nearby highway into warehouse parking lots.

Past the Taco Bell and next to the Refrigeration Supply Depot, you can find Westmag’s tiny workshop filled with Chinese machinery. The CNC machines, the metal stamping tools, even the Unitree robot sitting on the couch in the lobby are all from China. That’s the problem Hansen and his cofounder Jordan Sanders are trying to solve.

“China gets to do all the fun stuff. I really like factories… So we get to steal back from China all the fun stuff, which is manufacturing,” Hansen tells me.

Westmag’s office featuring its China-made robotic companion.

The device you’re reading this on almost certainly contains an actuator. By the end of this story, you’ll start seeing them everywhere — in your car, your camera, your vacuum. They are the small, unheralded engines of modern comfort. More to the point, for the future of industry, they are the foundation of modern hardware, making robot arms move, factories hum and weapons weapon. Most of them are made in China.

That fact, which people naively ignore, is one of the major obstacles sitting between the U.S. and its grand reindustrialization dreams. The U.S. can assemble all the humanoids and self-guided missiles it wants, but if it doesn’t make the motors and actuators inside them, it stays dependent on whoever does. Right now, there are shockingly few folks figuring out how to tackle this uncomfortable, if not existential, truth.

It’s the people, like Hansen, who are weird enough to love actuators who might give the U.S. a real shot at a future it builds itself.

HANSEN, 41, STANDS six foot four, often sporting a backwards cap and a jade fishing-hook necklace, a Māori token for safe travels. As such, he sticks out like a sore thumb on a Chinese factory floor. He’s been called “forward” by Midwest manufacturing standards, but I find the directness is part of his charm. Formalities bore him, he says. He prefers to get straight to the point — how are we going to fix this mess?

He grew up, in his words, a robot kid. Hansen’s last company built self-balancing bikes and motorcycles back when you couldn’t just buy a cheap robot actuator off the shelf. So, they made everything themselves, by hand-winding the wire, placing the magnets, and building the electronics and gearing from scratch. Then, in 2024, the company took a nosedive. That’s when he started tweeting.

Hansen went back through his old company archives and posted all the secrets — innards of actuators, factory photos, his own predictions about where prices were headed. “Half my tweets were just screenshots from AliExpress,” Hansen says. His network now — Westmag’s customers, other founders and enthusiasts — all derived from his constant actuator posting. He became known as the motor guy on X. Jeff Bezos even follows him.

By late 2024, Hansen figured he should probably get a job, except, as he put it, “I’ve never had a job.” So instead, he drove around the country talking to robotics and drone companies, where he kept hearing the same complaint: every shop has a guy sitting alone trying to build motors in-house, it never works, and everyone’s stuck buying from China. “People just kept telling me, ‘I need a solution. What are you going to do about it? You know all the problems. What are you going to do about it?’” Hansen says. One of those people was Sanders, an old friend who’d backed the failing motorcycle company and stuck around as an advisor. They started Westmag, short for Western Magnetics Company, last May.

Jordan Sanders (left) and David Hansen (right) in the Westmag HQ.

The pair’s first round of funding came when Nat Friedman — former GitHub CEO, prolific angel investor, current Meta executive — slid into Hansen’s X DMs last April. He paraphrased the message from Friedman for me: Hey, I’ve invested in several companies, spent some time on robot actuators lately, talked to a lot of teams, would love to chat.

The first idea the gang kicked around with Friedman was to, well, just go buy a motor factory in China. “He’s like, ‘Do you want to just go to China next week?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely. Yes. Not going to ask my wife. That’s just a yes,’” Hansen says. They didn’t end up going. The problem, Hansen realized, is that you can’t actually buy a Chinese motor factory because the factory isn’t the thing.

“If you want to buy a motor factory or an actuator factory, you can’t just buy the factory, you have to buy the neighborhood,” Hansen tells me.

The suppliers in China cluster so tightly that each neighborhood itself functions as the production line — pick up one shop and you’ve got a building full of equipment and none of the complementary knowledge that made it work. So Friedman funded the $1 million pre-seed for another version of the plan: acquire the machines piece by piece, haul them across the Pacific, and rebuild the factory in San Francisco.

Standing up this production stateside requires, as Hansen likes to quip: “A bucket of money. The biggest one.”

So far, investors and politicians seem to get the point — but in moderation. Last August, Westmag raised an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Founders Fund, Lux, and Menlo participating. Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer also visited the Westmag HQ and announced the field trip on LinkedIn, touting her work on “the future of American manufacturing.” Westmag and America, though, still have much to do.

“By the end of this year we’ll be in the tens of thousands of motors per month,” Sanders says, only for Hansen to interject, “Which is not enough.” And to which Sanders agrees, “Which is not enough for our customers.”

WHAT IS an actuator? When I asked Sanders, he got lost trying to turn the definition into a haiku. So, while he thinks about that, I guess I’ll be the one to tell you.

It’s part of a machine that turns energy — electric, hydraulic, pneumatic — into motion. An electric actuator, which is the one we care the most about here, is usually a package of three things: a motor (the thing that spins), control electronics (that tell it how fast and how hard), and gearing (that trades speed for torque so it can push or hold weight). Actuators can move in a straight line or in a circular motion, known as linear or rotary, respectively.

What makes them so special is their broad use in manufacturing things like a plane’s landing gear, sewing machines, your car’s seat adjusters. Just about every machine that moves is thanks to an actuator. I will repeat: these parts are largely manufactured in China.

China’s dominance in actuator manufacturing traces back to two industrial markets that happen to need the same part. The first is drones, which use motors in their propellers. One report estimates Chinese companies “control 90% of the consumer drone market, 70% or more of the enterprise market, and 92% of the state and local first responder market.” (I previously wrote about a startup working to revive the U.S. drone industry.)

The other, bigger one is electric vehicles. China’s rush to go all-in on electric vehicles gave it exactly the industrial stack that motion-based hardware runs on: batteries, power electronics, sensors, precision motors, and the rare-earth magnets that sit at the heart of any electric motor. Tens of millions of EVs later, China controls both the assembly and the whole supply chain beneath it, down to the magnet processing. Chinese automakers produced roughly 60% of all electric cars sold worldwide in 2025.

There is a blossoming third industry here: robotics. China accounted for nearly 90% of the humanoid market last year. It’s still a really tiny market, with somewhere between 13,000 and 18,000 humanoids sold around the world in 2025. But those robots require a load of actuators, which eat up between 40% to 60% of the cost of a building one.

Some analysts (and, of course, hardware nerds) expect the humanoid market to explode in the coming years. I’m personally not betting on a humanoid feeding my cat for me by 2030, but American startups like Figure and Agility are very much making the explosion assumption. If you think drones, electric vehicles and robots will matter in the future, then the United States has a problem. Or, in the words of my boss Ashlee Vance, “We’re so fucked.”

SINCE YOU definitely listen to our podcast, you probably noticed I’ve gone from U.S. manufacturing skeptic to acolyte. Once you visit companies like Ulysses and Brinc, it’s hard not to leave the warehouse realizing how fucked we really are. Even the guy taking on China by himself, Elon Musk, is buying Chinese actuators for his humanoids. It doesn’t take a huge leap in logic to wonder how screwed we would be if, say, China invades Taiwan and trade ties are cut off.

The good news here is that designing motors and actuators is not a dark art. Many people know how to make these things, and the schematics for them (including Chinese designs) are pretty easy to find. The trick is committing to some standardized designs and then pumping them out by the millions.

Take, for example, the story of MIT researcher Ben Katz. He open-sourced his own motor design and watched it get cloned into China-made products on AliExpress — an outcome he openly called a dream. That’s because China did what America hasn’t figured out; took a useful architecture and built a shitload of them, cheaper and faster than anyone else.

No one who does business with China would say this aloud, but we have come to the part of the program where the U.S. must now steal — or borrow, if your sensibilities prefer — from the P.R.C. Instead of having each hardware start-up try to show off with its own approach to motors and actuators, the U.S. needs to mimic China and piggyback off the same standardized, openly available designs and then fire up the mass production.

“We are grounding our motor and actuator designs in what is already in-demand at scale, which are the motors and actuators that are being produced in China,” Sanders says.

The process of making one works something like this: a stator, the stationary core of the motor, is a hunk of about 30 razor-thin sheets of electrical steel, pressed, stacked, pressed again, then powder-coated in green (Westmag is trying to make theirs orange like the company logo, which Hansen admits is “going to be an engineering task” since the coating isn’t heat-rated). Westmag stamps those sheets themselves now, uses a machine to wind the wire, and will soon also cut its own magnets down to size — going, as Hansen puts it, “up to cutting metal, but not melting metal.” The steel comes from the US or Japan.

Get your actuators

The real barrier that has held the U.S. back from motor and actuator glory is cost. The Chinese-style designs are optimized for things that are cheap in China and expensive here. Hansen holds up a motor part machined from a solid block of aluminum. In China, he says, that costs about as much as the raw block — the labor rounds to nothing. “Go ask [SendCutSend CEO] Jim Belosic to do that. It’s very expensive to do,” he adds. (Belosic also invested in Westmag, and SendCutSend sponsors Core Memory).

Westmag’s gamble is that the expense is only temporary — a function of low volume, not American inadequacy. Hansen’s argument runs like this: at a big enough scale, the cost of almost anything drifts down toward the cost of its raw materials, the steel, the copper, the magnets, and the labor premium that makes a single American-made part pricey shrinks toward nothing. “You can reach efficiencies of scale with almost any widget once there’s enough of them,” he says.

Hansen calls this the “dumb-guy, smart-guy” approach. Don’t try to improve the motor, just try to make it, because building it is what teaches you to be good at it. This, Sanders adds, requires resisting the Silicon Valley urges to “disrupt” and “revolutionize” and convince people that you’ve outthought a whole industry.

“[You can] use a woo-woo AI to optimize perfectly, but there’s a ceiling to what you can do and it turns out it just doesn’t matter,” Hansen says. “You just have to make something first. Make a bunch of something first and then once you have the machine, which is actually the factory running, then you can optimize stuff.”

The company has already partnered with high-volume customers, though they wouldn’t name exactly who, to jump right into its scaling bet. The plan is to make motors by the tens of thousands a month, then actuators, then as the theory goes, the math stops looking insane. “We started the company with a thesis: if you can aggregate the demand across companies, now it actually might make sense to build it here,” Sanders tells me.

Not everyone in the actuator business believes that. About 400 miles south, another startup is making the opposite bet — that trying to mass-manufacture a commodity in the United States is a patriotic fantasy, and that the smart move is to keep the clever part here and build the rest somewhere cheaper.

TOM BARON was 20 years-old when he started throwing up blood.

He didn’t dwell on the episodes at first. Baron prided himself on working hard and figured puking blood might just be part of the job. “When you’re 20, you don’t think ‘I’m sick,’” Baron says. “You think you’re being a little bitch.”

And so the puking went on for months. Then, one day, Baron took a boat ride with some friends, fell out of the boat and discovered that he couldn’t stay afloat despite being a strong swimmer. This incident finally drove him to the hospital where doctors diagnosed him on the spot with a collapsed lung. It took another few weeks to find what caused the lung to collapse in the first place, which was a very rare cancer (stage-four) in his peritoneum, the lining of the abdomen. He went through twelve surgeries in about six weeks. Doctors tried to move him to hospice. Then Johns Hopkins took him on.

“They were like, ‘Hey kid, basically you’re probably going to die, but [we’ll] try out some cool stuff on you if you accept,’” Baron says. He had a sixteen-hour operation — surgeons cut out every cancerous lesion they could see, then circulated heated chemotherapy inside his abdomen for the duration. It worked. He’d passed his five-year remission mark three weeks before we spoke.

Before the illness sidelined him, Baron had been in constant motion. He moved around the country a lot as a kid, the result of his Navy pilot father. After high school, he went straight into the workforce. His first gig was writing attitude-control software for small satellites and prototype engineering for a climate-tech company. He founded a few small startups with “minor exits” before he spent six years at MITRE, the federally funded research outfit that functions, in Baron’s words, as a pseudo extension of the government. His job was to get loaned out to agencies and build prototypes, much of it drone work, which took him to Colombia and a string of other far off places.

After recovering from the brunt of his cancer ordeal, Baron welcomed his first child. The series of massive life moments rearranged his sense of what to do with his time. He didn’t want to spend it getting passed around government agencies and away from his family. He wanted to do something bigger. So he left MITRE and landed at a defense startup called Mach Industries. That’s where he met Christian Mochen and Carlo Dela Rosa, the trio that would cofound Atlas Motion Systems and open a second front to pursue America’s actuator dream.

THE THREE MEN codified their shared love for motors and actuators while sitting around a bonfire constructed in the Mach parking lot. Beers were being passed and shop was being talked. Baron would grumble that his government work always suffered because it revolved around small numbers of bespoke parts. Suppliers didn’t feel like doing custom tweaks for low volume orders, which, in turn, limited innovation. Mochen had similar issues only from the opposite extreme. He’d mass produced cars at Toyota and Tesla and couldn’t demand the requisite attention even with all that heft. “Magnet sourcing was a huge issue even at Tesla,” Mochen says. “Although Tesla had an arm in China, for our U.S. plants, they still wouldn’t give us the best-grade magnets they had.”

America, they decided then and there, needed to control its motor and actuator destiny and that would mean controlling the entire motor and actuator supply chain. And that would mean doing something drastic. They quit their jobs, incorporated in February, and — with $300k of their own money and a $4.5 million pre-seed investment — Baron got on a plane to the Philippines to build a factory.

WESTMAG’S ANSWER was to build in America and bet that scale would eventually drag the cost down. Atlas looked at the same problem and drew the opposite conclusion. “We make them where it makes sense,” Mochen says. “The Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States, the unit economics make sense, and it benefits the average American taxpayer at the end of the day.”

What Atlas found in the Philippines is the thing Westmag wants to import: a neighborhood. Atlas’ factory is clustered near manufacturing hubs for Toyota, Nidec, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Honda, Dyson — close enough that Baron calls it “a little mini-Shenzhen effect.”

The neighborhood effect makes the expert labor cheap and readily available. Baron says that 77,000 English-speaking engineers graduate from Filipino universities every year. He added that hiring a CNC machinist at Mach took six months. In the Philippines, they post a job and have ten qualified people by the end of the day.

The difference also shows up in those pesky costs. Baron says they sent one machined part to Protolabs, a U.S. shop with global manufacturing hubs including China, and paid $3,500 for ten pieces. They sent the same part to a local shop in the Philippines and got fifty pieces for $16. “Better quality,” Mochen adds. “And faster.”

The way Atlas runs splits the company across an ocean. The California side — an arm in Long Beach, Calif. — handles the high-variability, low-volume work. Which brings us to what Hansen might describe as some woo-woo AI software, and what Atlas likes to call Vector.

Vector is the software system the Atlas team built to spin up and iterate new motor designs in five to ten minutes from a common set of raw inputs. It’s centered on an in-house, physics-based AI model trained on every piece of motor designs Atlas could feed it. Open-source architectures, the team’s own internal designs, academic papers, and expired patents.

An actuator design spun up on Vector — minus all the proprietary information.

For example, a customer gets on a call and says they need a motor that hits a certain RPM at a certain voltage and fits inside a thirty-millimeter slot. Today, Mochen says, that customer would normally have to compromise on their custom specs and opt for a standardized piece because designing a new motor from scratch requires six months of work “with four cross-functional engineers or engineering teams,” by which point the customer may have moved onto a different design entirely, making the ordered part obsolete.

The Vector software generates the geometry, runs the finite-element and electromagnetic simulations, produces a spec sheet, builds the bill of materials, and cross-checks against Atlas’ own warehouse inventory so the team knows what they actually have on hand to build it. Then it models the new motor against the customer’s own platform, like a drone, to predict performance before anything is assembled. Whatever they prototype on a test stand in Long Beach gets fed back into the model to train it.

Once a design is locked, the architecture moves to the Philippines for mass production at a facility Atlas owns outright. “We’re not using subcontractors out there,” Mochen says. The bread and butter is motors and actuators, specifically the brushless DC motor, the kind that spins a drone’s propeller. Design in America, build at volume in Asia, keeping both ends in-house.

How long would I have to wait to get an Atlas motor in-hand? Mochen and Baron squirm at the question. “If it’s a net new design that we just don’t have any inventory for … it would take you around eight weeks to get your motor,” Mochen says. They’re trying to bring that down to a week, which they say requires fresh funding to pull off.

It also requires boots on the ground. Baron moved his family out to Manila in the early months of Atlas to stand the operation up. The third cofounder, Dela Rosa — who’d built a manufacturing plant in India for the defense company Shield AI — is on the ground there now.

“In California, as soon as you get a warehouse, there’s all this temporal overhead that goes into building out a factory,” Baron says. “Whereas in the Philippines, we get the keys to the spot, we’re able to get through the bureaucracy fairly quickly, and our people are renovating the factory as soon as we get the keys, and we’re ready to put machines in within three weeks of opening the lease. Which I don’t think would be possible, frankly, in California.”

IT’S BETTER for America to manufacture abroad, according to Baron. In fact, trying to build everything in the United States is, in his words, a little silly.

Not because he’s against it — he’s careful to say he isn’t — but because he thinks it misreads where American advantage actually lies. “One of the U.S.’s biggest assets is that we’re quite well-liked around the world, despite what the news would have you believe,” he says. The Filipinos, he believes, would rather work with Americans than with the Chinese. As Baron sees it, America will win back manufacturing dominance through its allies, not by walling itself off from them.

“The thing we want to do as a company is project commercial power throughout the world,” Baron says. He adds that DJI and BYD are kind of the reverse of us. “They project Chinese commercial power by making the best products in the world in their categories… Silicon Valley should strive to do the same, which is, build things the entire world wants, not things the Department of War can subsidize with their high premiums. We want to make something people in India, Poland, Nigeria want to buy — and we have customers in those places.”

For all his certainty about where the work should happen, Baron isn’t smug about the personal toll of it. “I would like to manufacture in the U.S. It sucks to fly 15 hours to Manila,” he says. His wife and kid are there now, and though his father immigrated from the very same town decades ago, it isn’t exactly home for him yet. He’d rather make things in California or Texas. He just doesn’t think the math adds up for the moment. So, instead of hand-wringing in an American factory about costs, Baron believes the best way to tackle China’s dominance is to play the game internationally.

“The story will be written that we failed to recapture our ability to make our own robots, and we essentially lost our sovereignty and became subjugated to those who did — or the story will be that we recaptured it and maintained our sovereignty,” Baron says. “That’s our worldview, and why we think it’s so important.”

PEOPLE IN the American Hardware Clan have known about the motor and actuator crisis for some time. It’s been right up there with the battery crisis, the drone crisis and the solar crisis. All of these are technologies America helped invent and needs but can no longer make in very meaningful quantities. Since the U.S. still has no answer to BYD in batteries or DJI in drones, you might ask why people are suddenly taking motors and actuators so seriously.

Like everything at the moment, the answer revolves around AI. Many people view humanoids and their ilk as the inevitable physical manifestations of AI technology. And it’s here that things turn more personal and intimidating than batteries and solar cells. Americans can tolerate their electric stove being “powered by BYD,” but will they accept a Chinese-made humanoid next to them on the factory line or in their home? The U.S. military would seem to want to draw the line at its soldiers of the future having all their joints and limbs produced in Shenzhen.

“If you are AGI-pilled and you think that AI is going to get out of data centers and it’s going to be embodied and it’s going to be in robots, then that’ll be the biggest industry in the history of the world and we don’t need just millions of actuators,” Hansen says. “We need billions of them. And if you want to control your own destiny, you have to own your supply chain.”

Fortunately, the American manufacturing renaissance is picking up steam, and some of the best-capitalized private companies in history are taking notice. Sam Altman said on our very own podcast that OpenAI will manufacture its own actuators. The startup recently even posted an open role for an actuator design engineer “focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics.”

For its part, the U.S. government has been working its way down the supply chain to weaken China’s stronghold — first chip fabs, then EVs, then drones — each one with a different mix of tariffs, export controls, procurement bans and subsidies. Actuators may be next, even if Washington hasn’t quite said so. “Smart government folks have looked around and been like, ‘What else does this apply to?’ So it’s chip fabs, drones, what comes after drones? And we’ve been running around telling everyone: inside every robot actuator is a drone motor. China is really good at robots because they got really good at drone motors,” Hansen says.

So far, there is no CHIPS-style act for actuators, no targeted subsidy, no Department of Energy motor-fab program. The de facto sanctions on China-made drones put startups like Westmag and Atlas in a better position, but it doesn’t prevent American drone companies from buying motors from China.

On that point, neither Atlas nor Westmag would name their customers. That reticence is something I first picked up listening to Ashlee ask hardware startups whether they make their own motors — and watching the bashful faces that question tends to produce. My read is that some companies may claim to build it all themselves when, in reality, they’re buying from startups like these two, or buying the parts from China and clicking them together stateside. “We don’t want to neg someone’s narrative,” Baron says when I ask about this.

Two customers, the biggest of them all, would be the government and defense primes. Planes, ships, drones, all of them need motors and actuators. Westmag went to Michigan to convince the once-great-manufacturing-hub to fork over government cash to reshore this production. “What’s interesting is the government suddenly being into our shit. There’s a lot of motion right now,” Hansen says. Westmag declined to share whether they’re on track to receive federal funding.

Meanwhile, the Atlas cofounders aren’t opposed to federal funding, but they think becoming a defense contractor is essentially a trap. “Over the next 18 months, with the demand being shoved into the industry by the drone dominance program right now, there’s going to be a lot of subsidization efforts that allow companies to come in and solve the problem the wrong way,” Mochen says. That is, not utilizing ally nations and becoming a globally dominant industry.

Strip both ideas down and the disagreement is simple. Westmag thinks American means American soil. Atlas thinks American means American owned. One of those might even turn out to be the right answer for the next century of hardware in the U.S.