Ore to Action — the physical-intelligence stack

A self-guided descent through 27 strata

Every action a machine takes
begins as ore.

Between a rare earth deposit in Inner Mongolia and an autonomous grasp in a distribution center sit roughly 27 layers of civilisation — neodymium reduction cells, vacuum-arc bearing steels, 100:1 strain-wave flexsplines, high-slot-fill needle windings, 24-bit optical encoders, 50 kHz GaN servo drives, rigid body spatial algebra, action chunking transformers, and finally a human determining whether the autonomous hour was worth anything. This is the whole chain, one layer at a time, with the companies that own each link.

How to read this

Each stratum is a layer of the stack; each station inside it is a distinct technology, process or market with its own physics and its own incumbents. The coloured pips on a card are a criticality read — how concentrated and how substitutable that link is. Three magenta pips means a genuine single point of failure for the whole industry.

Figures reflect public reporting through mid-2026 and move fast — treat capacities, cycle times, and roadmap dates as of that vintage, not as live data. Company lists are illustrative of who matters at each link, not exhaustive or ranked, and nothing here is investment advice. Built as a map for understanding, not a database of record.

The dependency web

Every station, stacked by depth. Hover a node to light its supply cone; click to pin it and open the station. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom.

what it needs (upstream) what it feeds (downstream) zoom in to read names

The same column, by who stands in it

Where the barrier actually is.

You have walked down this column by depth, by size, by place and by time. Here it is again, sized by how much of each layer's cast sits in one country. Everything on this page is computed from the corpus at render — nothing is fetched, so nothing can go stale.

bar length & shade — the value on the axis above a chokepoint station: a single point of failure click any row for its roster
How to read this

Bar length is jurisdictional concentration — the Herfindahl index over the countries the layer's organisations are based in, where 1 is every one of them in the same place. Longer means more concentrated, which on this page means a deeper moat. The magenta pips past the end of each bar are chokepoint stations: places the corpus marks as a single point of failure.

A layer can be diverse and still single-sourced. Transmission spans multiple jurisdictions and holds single points of failure in strain-wave flexsplines. The index is about spread; it says nothing about substitutability, and the two come apart exactly where it matters most. That is what the pips are for, and what Faults is for.

No prices are held anywhere on this site. The price column in the Index links out to Yahoo tickers. Sources and known weaknesses are on Method.

Sixteen orders of magnitude, drawn to scale

Feel a micrometer.

Everything here is drawn at its true relative size. Scroll, drag or use ← → to travel from NdFeB lattice spacing to the planetary supply footprint. Click anything to centre it.

the centre line — the size read out beside it one power of ten per tick, taller at the SI prefixes true relative size — the shapes are schematic, the sizes are not height carries nothing — tracks prevent overlap anything smaller than a pixel is not drawn
across the view
How to read this

The horizontal axis is logarithmic: every — pixels is one power of ten. Objects are drawn at true relative size — if something looks a hundred times bigger than its neighbour, it is a hundred times bigger.

Shapes are schematic; proportions are not. Each object carries a precision flag: exact for defined physical quantities, typical for production values, approx for order of magnitude. Sources and reasoning are on Method.

Fifty-six key robotics sites, drawn to scale

Every chokepoint is a place.

Fifty-six sites resolving to stations in the corpus. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, click anything to open it. Circles are true to the ground — the ring around Bayan Obo really is fifty kilometres across.

a geodesic ring at the site's true radius — widens towards poles due to map projection a chokepoint, named in amber: a single point of failure every other site, drawn smaller colour is legended on the map itself
across the view
How to read this

Rings are geodesic: a hundred points, each exactly the stated distance from the centre, projected in equirectangular coordinates. Each site carries a precision flag: sited where published, approx where reconstructed from public reporting, area where the point is the centre of an industrial cluster.

Every capability in the stack, with two dates

Everything here is older than it looks.

The left end of each bar is the year a capability first worked. The right end is the year it arrived in volume. Drag the year, or sweep it, and watch the stack fill in. Click any bar to read what it was waiting for.

solid to current year, faint for remainder of wait shipped in volume no volume date yet first worked before 1954 the figure past each bar is the years it waited
How to read this

Invented is the year the capability was first demonstrated in working form. Shipped is the year it reached volume or general availability. Confidence flags: dated where widely recognized, contested where boundary lines vary.

Exposure mapping, not prediction

Cut one link. Follow it up.

Remove a station and the dependency graph says what sits downstream of it. That number is arithmetic and not damage — what actually reroutes, and what dead-ends, is a separate qualitative reading.

How to read this

Each row is a stratum and each cell a station. A white cell is the removed link. Faintly coloured cells depend on it somewhere upstream. Amber and magenta cells show qualitative substitution difficulty: amber where an alternative exists, magenta where nothing substitutes on a short timescale.

Ore to action, actually quantified

What does one autonomous hour really cost?

Follow 1 hour of autonomous physical work backwards through the whole stack across 3 machine classes (Industrial arm, Mobile manipulator, Humanoid), converting units at every step, until it arrives at ore. Every factor below is sourced or derived in the open; press how on any step to see the working.

How to argue with this

Each step is a single multiplication, and each multiplier is cited or derived in the panel behind its how button. Ranges reflect low and high parameter bounds propagated through the chain.

Sources, assumptions and limits

How this site knows what it claims.

What the words mean

Where each kind of claim comes from

Grouped by epistemic basis, weakest first. Judgement calls are listed before cited figures on purpose.

Against the grain

Findings that contradict common assumptions about robotics and physical AI.

The assumption ledger

Every parameter behind the Cascade, generated directly from data/static/cascade.json.

Switchable assumptionOptionsWhat it means
ParameterCentralRangeDerivationSource

Where this is most likely wrong

Self-declared limitations and edge cases.

Corrections

Figures reflect public reporting through . Company lists are illustrative, not exhaustive. Built as a map for understanding, not a database of record. This page last reviewed .

CompanyWhat it does here StationBase Ticker