📍 Paris, France 📅 July 7, 2026
While major events dedicated to robotics are still largely dominated by the United States and Asia, MACHINA by RAISE is trying to build a more European approach to the robotics revolution and “physical AI”. Organized in Paris in the RAISE ecosystem, the event is positioned less as a classic industrial show than as a platform for convergence between artificial intelligence, robotics, venture capital, industry and technological infrastructure.
The timing of the launch of MACHINA is particularly revealing. For several years, Europe has mainly observed the American rise in artificial intelligence and Asian domination of robotic industrial capabilities. The term “physical AI”, omnipresent in event communication, designates this new generation of systems capable of perceiving, understanding and acting in the real world. After the wave of LLMs and software agents, the industry is now entering a phase where AI begins to directly control robots, autonomous vehicles, industrial systems or logistics infrastructures.
This change is profoundly transforming the way investors and manufacturers analyze robotics. For a long time, robots were considered relatively rigid machines, limited to repetitive tasks in highly controlled environments. The arrival of multimodal models and “vision-language-action” architectures now opens the way to much more flexible systems, capable of interacting with complex and dynamic environments.
MACHINA seeks precisely to decipher this new industrial phase.
The event brings together very different profiles: startup founders, specialized funds, industrialists, researchers, AI specialists, component manufacturers and large companies seeking to integrate autonomous systems into their operations.
This diversity is important because robotics can no longer be analyzed solely as a hardware subject. The balance of power is now shifting towards several critical layers:
- AI models;
- orchestration software;
- sensors;
- energy systems;
- precision components;
- compute infrastructures;
- supply chains.
Paris also appears to be a relatively logical location for this type of initiative. France has several strategic assets: a rapidly growing AI ecosystem around Mistral AI, historical players in industrial automation, solid academic research and a growing network of startups working on drones, autonomous systems, defense or medical robotics.
But MACHINA above all reflects a broader European concern: the risk of strategic dependence on the United States and China.
The United States now largely dominates:
- AI models;
- cloud infrastructures;
- financing;
- software architectures.
China, for its part, is massively accelerating on:
industrial production;
- the components;
- batteries;
- manufacturing robots;
- the industrialization of humanoids.
In this context, Europe is trying to preserve a position on certain critical layers: industrial robotics, advanced automation, edge AI, industrial infrastructures and specialized components.
MACHINA therefore also functions as a space for strategic reflection on European technological sovereignty. The subject of humanoid robots should occupy a central place in the 2026 edition. After several years of spectacular demonstrations, the market is gradually entering a much more pragmatic phase. Discussions are now less about the ability of robots to walk or manipulate objects than about their real cost, their maintenance, their energy autonomy or their ability to be deployed in real industrial environments.
This development strongly attracts investors. Humanoids are beginning to be seen no longer as an experimental market, but as a potential new layer of economic infrastructure, capable of automating:
- logistics;
- warehouses;
- certain industrial operations;
- maintenance;
- services;
- part of health and assistance activities.
MACHINA also highlights a subject often underestimated in discussions on AI: the energy question. Autonomous systems require massive computing capacities, high-performance batteries, real-time infrastructures and sophisticated sensor networks. “Physical AI” could thus become one of the new drivers of global demand for semiconductors, energy and computing infrastructures.
What ultimately makes MACHINA particularly interesting in 2026 is that it’s not just about robots or automation. The event poses a much more structuring question: who will control future physical infrastructures driven by artificial intelligence?
Because behind humanoid robots, autonomous systems and demonstrations of “physical AI”, a new global industrial battle is gradually taking shape relating to production, logistics, critical infrastructures and the automation of advanced economies.
