More than half of America's industrial robots sit in just 10 states

Robot geography follows the car industry, not the technology industry. The intuitive map puts automation in California and Texas. The measured one puts it in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, because industrial robots are bought by heavy manufacturing and nearly half of the American installed base sits in automotive plants. That single fact explains almost the whole distribution.

Counts age badly and shares age well. The 233,305 total belongs to a smaller robot market than today's, and quoting it as a current national figure would be wrong. The proportions are more durable, because the auto corridor has not moved and the industry mix that produced the ranking has not been reordered.

There is no fresher version of this map that we could reach. The IFR publishes national totals rather than state-level breakdowns, and no free, fetchable source we tested redraws this analysis on newer data. A statistic that everyone repeats and nobody updates is a real gap, and this page exists partly to name it rather than to paper over it.

Use it for shape, not for scale. The ranking and the concentration are what this analysis supports; the absolute counts describe a smaller robot market than exists now.

Date it every time. Say the Brookings analysis of IFR data, published 2015, and let the reader weigh the age themselves rather than discovering it later.

Lead with the mechanism when you cite it. More than half of US robots in 10 states is a striking claim, and the reason, nearly half of the installed base being automotive, is what stops it sounding arbitrary.

If you need current national numbers, take them from the IFR releases rather than scaling these state figures up. There is no published factor for doing that conversion.

Quoting 233,305 as the number of robots in the United States today. It is a decade-old count and the installed base has grown well beyond it.

Assuming robot density tracks the technology sector. The entire West holds 13% of the total on this measure, barely more than Michigan alone.

Presenting the state ranking as current without a date. The shape is probably still broadly right; the vintage is not optional information.

Reading a high state count as high automation intensity. These are raw counts, not robots per worker, so a big manufacturing state will rank high simply by being big.

The counts and shares here are taken from the Brookings analysis directly, and each appears in its published text. We fetched the page through the same path the citation gate uses so the figures can be re-checked automatically rather than trusted once.

We searched for a more recent state-level breakdown before publishing this and did not find one that is free and machine-fetchable. That is a statement about what we could reach, not a claim that no such analysis exists anywhere, and we would rather say so than imply the map is current.

Confidence ratings split deliberately on this page. Raw counts rate Low because their vintage makes them unsafe to quote as current. Shares and the automotive mechanism rate Medium, because proportions and industry structure decay more slowly than headcounts.

The underlying robot counts are IFR data as analysed by Brookings, so this is a secondary treatment of a primary series. We name that rather than presenting Brookings as the origin of the numbers.