The White House hosted its “first humanoid robot guest” on Wednesday, with first lady Melania Trump appearing alongside a robot from robotics upstart Figure AI.

The robot, identified as Figure 3, accompanied the first lady during the second day of the Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition Summit, a gathering focused on technology and children’s education. 

The machine greeted attendees in multiple languages and described itself as “a humanoid built in the United States of America,” according to widely circulated footage from the event.

The display represented one of, if not the, highest-profile showcases of humanoid robotics in the U.S. to date and highlights how the tech is becoming a national priority amid global tech competition. Beijing has also promoted humanoid robots at highly publicized events this year.

The first lady used the robot to promote her push for artificial intelligence in children’s education, suggesting that the robots could one day act as interactive educators at home. However, Figure AI says its third-generation humanoids are also applicable for more general purposes, including commercial and household tasks. 

The White House spotlight is likely to boost the brand of Nvidia-backed Figure AI, a lesser-known robot company compared to larger humanoid players like Tesla‘s Optimus and Boston Dynamics, though some of its team comes from those competitors, as well as tech giants like Apple.

Figure AI was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, a tech entrepreneur and billionaire who previously co-founded the publicly traded drone company Archer Aviation and a digital hiring marketplace Vettery. 

Powering its robots is the firm’s in-house Helix AI system, a vision-language-action model that powers its robots and enables learning through observation and verbal commands.

Amid growing investor excitement for physical AI, the firm raised more than $1 billion in its Series C funding round in September led by Parkway Venture Capital with participation from other notable investors such as Nvidia, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Salesforce. That gave it a post-money valuation of $39 billion. 

The fundraising is expected to be put towards the firm’s aim to deploy thousands of robots in homes and logistics over the coming years — a goal that has likely been made easier by a major endorsement from the White House. 

Figure AI has already begun work with its first commercial customer in BMW, deploying its robots for tasks like handling sheet metal parts in manufacturing facilities.

It’s possible that Melania’s endorsement of Figure AI’s robots as potential educators will trigger a reexamination of an ongoing lawsuit the company found itself in last year. 

In November, Figure AI was sued by its former head of product safety, who alleged he was fired after warning executives that the company’s robots were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.

Gruendel also alleged that one robot had carved a gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction. Figure AI contends that Gruendel had been fired for poor performance, and described the allegations as “falsehoods.” Figure AI countersued in January, saying Gruendel failed in his role to help the company build a safe robot.

The lawsuit drew attention to broader questions about safety standards in humanoid robotics development and remains pending. 

Interestingly, the White House event on Wednesday wasn’t the first time that a company connected to Adcock received some major shine from the Trump administration. 

Shares of the drone company he co-founded, Archer Aviation, surged in June last year after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order directing the establishment of a program to promote the safe integration of electric air taxis in U.S. cities.

Archer is participating in the initiative and is working on projects involving aircraft demonstrations. Following the June 2025 executive order, Archer raised $850 million in a registered direct stock offering. 

He remains a shareholder, according to investment research platform Business Quant, but he has no active executive, board, or advisory position at the company. 

Just outside Ireland’s capital, Dublin, a data center has become the first in Europe to turn to an independent, so-called “islanded,” microgrid to keep its servers running.

Europe is looking to cash in on the AI boom while tackling power connection delays that have persisted for decades. The European Commission estimates the bloc needs at least 1.2 trillion euros ($1.39 trillion) in investments by 2040. In some cases, companies can’t wait for bottlenecks to be eased and are turning to their own sources of power.

The Dublin facility, operated by power supply solutions provider AVK and digital infrastructure developer Pure Data Centre Group, could mark the continent’s first step toward a privately powered ecosystem.

Microgrids are localized energy systems that can generate, store, and distribute power. The systems are already being widely used in the U.S., where a boom in data centers in red-hot areas like Texas and Virginia has seen an increasing need for off-grid power.

AVK and Pure DC say their Dublin installation is the first data center in Europe to be operated by a live microgrid.

“As these data centers get bigger and we see AI workloads and that data becoming more of a feature in our day-to-day lives, that only puts more stress on the grid. So we have to drive to a different solution,” AVK CEO Ben Pritchard told CNBC.

The systems are not without their challenges. Regulatory hurdles could slow deployment, and the long-term success of microgrids likely depends on whether their power sources are both reliable and sustainable.

Ireland is one of two European countries to have enforced a moratorium on new data center applications as the energy-intensive facilities put pressure on the nation’s grid. The facilities consumed a staggering 22% of the small country’s power in 2024.

Ireland’s national grid operator warned in late February that meeting power demand could be “challenging” as consumers use electricity in new ways. It identified data centers as a key driver of that demand growth.

But late last year, Irish authorities eased the moratorium, as the AI boom saw sentiment U-turn on their economic potential.

All new data centers connecting to the grid must now provide dispatchable power — electricity that can be turned on or off depending on the national grid’s needs — or have the capacity to store energy. They must also source at least 80% of annual demand from renewable electricity generated in Ireland, according to guidelines set by the country’s regulator CRU.

“The alternative in Ireland was to wait, literally wait for an unknown time to be able to get a grid connection, and still today you’re not able to get a grid connection. So creating a microgrid enabled us to move our project forward,” Pure DC President Dawn Childs told CNBC.

Childs, who was appointed a Dame in the U.K. for her services to engineering, added that the project is intended as both an immediate and a long-term solution. “If we have to stay as an islanded solution, we absolutely can … However, to get the most sustainable solution and to provide services back into the grid in Dublin, in the most constrained area of Ireland, it would be our desire to get a grid connection.”

The Dublin data center, which can run both cloud and AI workloads, has a total capacity of about 110 megawatts. Total projected investment in the site is about 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion).

The facility is currently powered by natural gas engines with the ability to switch to Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO). The site has also trialled biomethane as a power source.

If the Dublin data center does eventually secure a grid connection, it will be able to offer dispatchable power and provide up to 20 MW of battery storage, Childs said.

The global microgrid market was worth around $29 billion in 2025, with Europe’s market expected to grow by nearly 10% per year due to its aging infrastructure, according to estimates from Global Market Insights. While investments are made in modernizing the national grid, companies are expected to increasingly turn to more immediate solutions for power.

Microgrids are already being used to power industrial sites and plants in Europe, but there aren’t many instances of them powering data centers when compared to the U.S.

In addition to AVK, companies such as ABB and Siemens are racing to develop the technology, with Schneider Electric opening a microgrid testing lab in Massachusetts last year to test the systems in real-world conditions.

Siemens sees “potential opportunities” for implementing microgrids at data center locations and is currently in discussions with several customers, a company spokesperson told CNBC. The topic is particularly relevant for the U.S. market, but it is also having similar discussions in Europe, they said.

Siemens is also interested in the use of microgrids to support electric vehicle charging infrastructure and port decarbonization.

AVK, which is expected to reach at least a billion-dollar valuation by 2030, initially focused on standby and backup power generation before expanding to become a full power solutions provider.

According to the company’s CEO, discussions and plans for microgrids were underway in Europe, but the U.S. market quickly overtook the 27-nation bloc. “It’s just that the U.S. has such a high demand that we’ve seen the rollout a little bit quicker than we’ve seen here in Europe,” Pritchard told CNBC, adding that the company is now seeing a new type of investor who is specifically interested in microgrids and not necessarily the data center itself.

“They’re infrastructure funds who are looking to build, own and operate microgrids and supply power to the data centers,” Pritchard said. He expects this type of asset class to mature over the next three to five years.

One of the biggest challenges facing the market is how microgrids are deployed sustainably, as much of the discussion on the tech has revolved around the use of gas turbines or fuel cells, Diego Diaz Hernandez, a partner at McKinsey, told CNBC.

“Making these assets grid participants in theory and in practice are very different questions,” Diaz Hernandez said.

“Technically speaking, it’s very feasible to do so, and we’ve seen examples of that in the U.S. [where] grid operators are requiring 50 or even 100 hours of flexibility out of the entire year in order to ease the pressure on the grid. So they’re not asking for a lot, but actually having the regulation and policy in place to allow for that to happen is a big question.”

Ensuring the power supply is reliable, as well as overcoming regulation, will also be key, Hernandez said. He noted that in the U.S., around 30% of data centers are adopting microgrid or other behind-the-meter solutions, like fuel cells and gas turbines — power sources that don’t require a connection to the main grid. In Europe, the share was just 5–10% 18 months ago, but has since already risen to about 20%, he added.

Challenges aside, the burden on data centers to provide their own sources of power is clearly growing. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said data centers “need some PR help” amid concerns about their impact on electricity prices.

AI robots will exceed the working population within a few decades as more firms adopt AI agents and continue to squeeze costs, a former Citi executive warned on Monday.

Rob Garlick, Citi Global Insights’ former head of innovation, technology, and future of work, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” that as leaders continue to prioritize profitability, their human workers will be left in the dust.

“We have a leadership system in the economic terms and business terms that celebrates profitability,” Garlick said in a conversation with CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick and Ben Boulos.

“When you marry profitability up with the technology progress, we have the biggest trade in history coming, which is basically that artificial intelligence will be able to do more and more, better and better, cheaper and cheaper, and that will be able to substitute for people.”

Garlick, who recently authored “AI – Anarchy or Abundance? Why the Future of Work Needs Pro-Human Leaders,” explained that his previous research at Citi showed that the number of AI robots is going to skyrocket as a result of these business decisions.

“We’re going to go over the next couple of decades to more moving robots than the working population, and then you add on agents, little agents, and it is going to explode,” he added.

AI robots ranging from humanoids to domestic cleaning robots and autonomous vehicles are forecasted to increase to 1.3 billion by 2035, according to a 2024 Citi report led by Garlick. The number of AI robots would quickly increase to over 4 billion by 2050, per the insights.

The Citi report even measured how long it would take for a robot to pay for itself through the money saved by replacing a human worker, for example, a $15,000 robot would break even in 3.8 weeks for a $41 an hour human job, or 21.6 weeks for a $7.25 human job. Meanwhile, a robot that costs $35,000 would have a payback time of 8.9 weeks for a $41 an hour human job.

“You can already buy a humanoid today, which gives you a payback period versus human workers of less than 10 weeks,” Garlick told CNBC, citing a figure from his book. “Humans can’t compete on this basis.”

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index report showed that 80% of leaders expect AI agents to be largely integrated into their AI strategy within the next 12 to 18 months. AI agents are a type of software program that can make decisions and complete tasks without much human direction.

Meanwhile, McKinsey & Company’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, noted that the company currently employs 20,000 agents alongside 40,000 humans, in an interview with Harvard Business Review. A year prior, the company only had 3,000 agents, and Sternfels predicts that in 18 months from now, there will be an equal number of employees and agents.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also shared similar views at the World Economic Forum’s flagship conference in Davos last month, saying that AI will likely surpass human intelligence by the end of this year.

“My prediction is, in the benign scenario of the future, that we will actually make so many robots in AI that they will actually saturate all human… there will be such an abundance of goods and services because my prediction is that there’ll be more robots than people,” Musk said.

Fears around AI replacing workers have mounted in the past year as major firms, including Amazon, Salesforce, Accenture, Heineken, and Lufthansa, have cited the technology as part of the reason for eliminating thousands of roles.

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director at the International Monetary Fund, told CNBC in January that AI is “hitting the labor market like a tsunami” and warned that “most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it.”

In the U.S., AI played a role in almost 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. in 2025, according to December data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

However, some leaders are striking a more positive tone. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang predicts that the “AI boom” will create six-figure salaries for the workers building AI and chip factories. Huang said the technology will boost skilled trade work, such as for plumbers, electricians, construction, and steel workers.