Who Owns the Truck

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta spent about $400 billion on capital expenditure in 2025 and guided to between $720 and $745 billion for 2026. That comes to roughly $1.1 trillion in two years, most of it for AI data centers. The public argument is mostly about chatbots: whether they write well, whether they make things up, whether they take office jobs.

I think we are watching the wrong screen. The chatbot is the demo. The bet pays off in robots, and we should fear them more than AI. AI lives in the abstract. Robots live in the physical world where our lives happen.

You can close a chatbot’s tab, but you can’t with your house. The EPA’s national activity survey found that Americans spend 87% of their time inside buildings and another 6% inside vehicles. Your health, sleep and safety depend on those buildings: the heat works in January, the air conditioning works in August, the water runs clean, the roof holds. A bad chatbot wastes an afternoon. A dead furnace during a cold snap sends people to the hospital.

Investors see this. Robotics startups raised $15 billion in 2025, more than in the 2021 peak, and $18.8 billion in 2026 before September. Figure AI raised money at a $39 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs found that the cost to build a humanoid fell about 40% in a single year, against the 15 to 20% its analysts expected. In September 2026 the bank raised its forecast for humanoid shipments in 2035 to 6.5 million units, more than four times its earlier call.

The prices are already small. Unitree lists its R1 humanoid at $5,900 and its G1 at $13,500. 1X takes orders for NEO, a household humanoid, at $20,000 or $499 a month, with deliveries scheduled for 2026. Tesla targets $20,000 to $30,000 for Optimus at scale. The median HVAC technician in America earns $61,010 a year before benefits. A machine that costs a third of that once, and works nights and weekends, does not need to match the technician. It needs to handle the routine calls.

No humanoid today can braze a copper line in a crawl space, and the first machines on the job are not humanoids at all. Husqvarna launched 13 robotic mowers that need no boundary wire in 2025. Robot vacuums sit in 15% of American homes. Dusty Robotics’ printers marked out 91 million square feet of construction layout, and JLG bought the drywall-finishing robot Canvas in January 2026.

Payroll tells you which trades go first. Census data shows wages eat 42% of revenue at janitorial firms, 36% in pest control, 33% in landscaping, and 27% in plumbing and HVAC, before benefits and payroll taxes. A robot saves its owner the most where labor is the largest cost and the work repeats. Cleaning and lawn care come first. The skilled trades follow as the machines learn to handle a furnace or a water heater that looks slightly different in every basement.

Mom-and-pop shops will not be the ones buying these machines. The Census counts 107,004 plumbing and HVAC contractors in America, and 63% of them take in under $1 million a year. The owner of a shop like that spends the week on people: finding technicians, training them, keeping the good ones, covering when someone calls in sick. The business runs on the culture that owner builds. A robot fleet calls for different skills: raising capital, buying hardware in bulk, and spreading the cost of software across thousands of jobs.

Private equity has those skills, and it already owns a growing share of the trades. PE firms bought nearly 800 HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies between 2022 and late 2024, according to PitchBook. In HVAC services, about half of the deals in 2026 had a financial sponsor behind them. Apex Service Partners, built by Alpine Investors, made 60 acquisitions in 2025 alone and brings in more than $3 billion a year across 75 brands. Apollo bought a stake in May 2026 at a reported $10 billion valuation. KKR owns Neighborly and its 28 brands. Apax owns Authority Brands, the parent of Mister Sparky and Benjamin Franklin Plumbing.

The owners are ready to sell. Half of American employer-business owners are 55 or older, and baby boomers own about 2.9 million firms that employ 32 million people. Many of those owners do not have a child who wants the business. For most of them, a fund offering cash at retirement is the best offer they will get.

Right now the roll-ups run into one limit: technicians. Apex says it trained more than 8,000 of them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 155,000 openings a year for HVAC mechanics, plumbers and electricians combined, mostly to replace workers who retire. A fund can buy a hundred companies but cannot hire people who do not exist. Robots remove that limit, and the company with the most machines wins. The neighborhood shop loses its one advantage: the skilled crew its owner knew how to keep.

Pest control shows where this ends. Spraying a perimeter is repeatable route work, and the industry consolidated long ago: 15 firms take 41% of all pest control revenue in the United States. In plumbing and HVAC, 338 firms take 27%. Robots turn more of the trades into route work.

We watched machines do this once before. American farms peaked at 6.8 million in 1935. The tractor and the combine did more than replace farmhands. They paid off for whoever could spread the cost of a machine over the most acres, so farms grew and their number fell. By 2025, 1.865 million farms remained, averaging 469 acres against 155 in 1935. Farm work fell from 41% of the American workforce in 1900 to 1.9% in 2000. Today 5% of farms produce half the value of everything grown.

The pitch to homeowners will be lower prices, and at first that will be true. A fleet with no overtime, no turnover and no callbacks can undercut a small shop, and the small shops will close or sell. Medicine shows what happens next. Anesthesia groups backed by private equity raised prices 26% after acquiring practices, against 12.9% for groups without PE money. In nursing homes, PE ownership raised patient mortality by 11%. The FTC sued a Texas anesthesia roll-up in 2023 over price increases worth tens of millions of dollars a year. A roll-up competes on price until its competitors are gone. After that, it answers to its fund.

The loss I worry about most is the path up. The median plumber earns $63,800, well above the $50,980 median for all American jobs, without a college degree. The trade also offered a route to ownership: apprentice, journeyman, then a truck with your own name on the door. A large part of the working middle class climbed that way. A robot does not quit to start a competing shop. When a fund owns the fleet, the path tops out at fleet supervisor, and the profit from keeping American homes livable goes to the fund’s investors instead of to the owner down the street.

I see no individual fix for this. A plumber cannot outspend Apollo, and telling tradespeople to learn robotics repeats the advice given to farmhands in 1940. The fixes are policy: antitrust review that treats a hundred small acquisitions as one merger, and financing that lets retiring owners sell to their own employees instead of to a fund. Neither exists at scale today.

AI changes what we read and write, and we can walk away from a screen. Robots change who owns the places we live in, and we cannot walk away from those.