In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote that software would eat the world. He was right. Fourteen years later, the world runs on software. Now he’s saying something bigger. “Robotics is going to be the biggest industry in the history of the planet. There are going to be hundreds of billions of robots of all shapes and sizes.” But here’s the uncomfortable truth: software isn’t done eating. It hasn’t even had breakfast. Software will keep eating the world, and the next course on the table is the physical world of atoms.
We think of robots as humanoids. Boston Dynamics. Tesla Optimus. Figure. Machines that walk and wave and weld. But that’s just one shape. Robots don’t need arms and legs. Tesla is already building robots on wheels. Zipline is building robots in the sky. Gecko Robotics builds wall-crawling robots that inspect power plants and refineries. A robot is not a body type. A robot is autonomy wrapped in hardware.
That’s the real shift. Hardware is the entry point. Autonomy is the multiplier. The body without the brain is nothing. The chassis is the shell. The moat is the mind.
Take Tesla. On the surface, it looks like a car company. But its moat isn’t the vehicle. It’s Autopilot, Full Self-Driving, and the massive neural nets trained on billions of miles of data. Tesla is a software AI company that happens to sell hardware. Over the next decade, cars will transform from tools of transportation to autonomous robots. And the companies that own the autonomy will own the industry.
Or look at Apple. The iPhone in 2025 isn’t what keeps people locked in. It’s not the aluminum or the glass. The real moat is iOS, the integration across apps, payments, cloud, and services. The iPhone is not a phone. It’s a software ecosystem you can’t leave.
NVIDIA is another example. The GPU was a leap in hardware engineering. But the thing that made NVIDIA untouchable wasn’t the chip. It was CUDA, the software layer that locked in developers and created an ecosystem. That’s why NVIDIA went from graphics cards to the most important AI company in the world.
This is the pattern. Hardware is a wedge. Software is the empire.
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