Agility's Digit 5 drops the cage around the humanoid at work
Two infrastructure stories this afternoon — one about robots that stop needing fenced-off floors, one about data centers that stop needing years of construction.
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid engineered to work next to people without physical barriers, and the bet is that certification, not capability, is what scales robots. The company says the robot watches for humans across a full 360-degree field, evaluates the risk as someone approaches, then slows, stops, or sits down and cuts motor power before a person can touch it — behavior decided dynamically, with no predefined safety zones and an independent safety controller as the last layer. The hardware was rebuilt around the same logic: the ostrich-style rear knees are gone, replaced by human-like legs on cycloidal actuators that repeatedly lift 50 lb (22.7 kg) loads, with a 90-minute battery that recharges in nine minutes for a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio, up from Digit 4's 2:1, letting it work more than 20 hours of a 24-hour day. Agility says customers have placed more than $300 million in multi-year orders, and Digit 5 is the company's first machine aimed at deployment outside North America, expected to carry CE marks for the EU and UK, timed as Agility prepares to go public through a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp. XI. This is the industrial answer to the standardization question we flagged in July — Arm wants an SAE-style capability ladder for robots: walking demos are commoditizing, and the moat is now whoever passes the audits.
Huawei launched what it calls the world's first 3D data center, stacking cooling, IT and power into separate floors to cut electrical installation time from six months to three. The layout puts liquid cooling below the server layer and the electrical system above it, with batteries isolated on the roof; because power and coolant travel vertically between floors instead of snaking across a flat hall, the run from power module to rack shrinks from 17 meters to 5, and IT power capacity rises from 76 MW to 168 MW. Over 90% of the major electrical and mechanical modules are prefabricated and factory-tested, giving a standardized nine-month delivery cycle, and Huawei says it has already deployed the design at three cloud hubs — Anhui, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia — matching its "East Data, West Computing" buildout. Rotating chairman Wang Tao framed the target directly: clusters of 100,000-plus accelerators, which means the binding constraint on inference capacity is increasingly concrete, copper and chillers, not chips — the same wall DeepSeek ran into planning a 160,000-chip Huawei cluster in Inner Mongolia. A China Electronics Standardization Institute-backed industry group is already drafting reference architectures and certifications around the design.
What to watch: whether Digit 5's CE certification actually lands — no humanoid has cleared EU machinery-safety rules for open-floor human work yet.
If a humanoid robot could work beside you with no safety fence, would you trust the certification or keep your distance? Tell us in the comments.
