BOTZ vs ROBO: Two Robotics ETFs, Two Opposite Bets
Both ETFs sell you "robotics." One is a concentrated bet on a few giants plus Nvidia. The other is a flat basket of 80 names where nothing tops 2%. Pick wrong and you own a different fund than you think.
AlphaOS investment intelligence · Research and education only — not investment advice
Holdings data as of August 10, 2026, pulled straight from each fund's reported book. The weights below are what these ETFs actually hold today, not estimates.
Two ETFs own the word "robotics." BOTZ, the Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence ETF, and ROBO, the ROBO Global Robotics & Automation ETF. Same pitch, same shelf, often bought interchangeably. Open the holdings and they turn out to be almost opposite bets.
BOTZ is a concentrated bet on a few giants
BOTZ holds 54 names, but the top ten are 61% of the fund. Three industrial-robotics heavyweights sit at the top: ABB at 9.83%, Keyence at 9.62%, and Fanuc at 8.97%. These are the companies that actually build the arms, sensors, and controllers on factory floors, and they're mostly Swiss and Japanese, so BOTZ carries a heavy non-US tilt whether you wanted one or not.
Then comes the holding that gives the fund away. Its fourth largest position isn't a robot maker at all. It's Nvidia at 8.35%, nearly as big as Fanuc. A chip company is doing a lot of the work in a fund people buy for robots. Intuitive Surgical, the surgical-robot leader, comes next at 6.29%, and after that you get Yaskawa, Cognex in machine vision, the self-driving-truck company Aurora, plus Alphabet and Tesla riding the AI-and-autonomy angle. AlphaOS flags the concentration risk here as High and rates the fund's overall quality Weak, with only about 55% of its scored holdings currently profitable.
ROBO spreads the bet across the whole supply chain
ROBO is built the other way. It holds 80 names and the biggest one is under 2%. The top ten add up to just 17.7% of the fund, so no single company can carry it or sink it. There's no Nvidia anywhere near the top. Instead you get the picks and shovels of automation: IPG Photonics in industrial lasers, Zebra Technologies in scanning and tracking, Rockwell Automation on the factory-controls side, Teradyne in chip-test equipment, Harmonic Drive in the precision gears that live inside robot joints, and the same Fanuc, Cognex, and Intuitive Surgical names BOTZ owns, just at far smaller weights.
That flatness shows up in the quality read too. About 83% of ROBO's scored holdings are profitable, versus 55% in BOTZ, and AlphaOS grades its concentration risk Low. It's a slower, broader way to own the theme, with fewer landmines and fewer moonshots.
So which bet are you actually making?
They aren't interchangeable, and choosing between them is really a question about what you believe.
If you think robotics gets won by a handful of dominant players and the AI-chip layer sitting underneath them, BOTZ gives you that in a concentrated punch, with Nvidia effectively riding shotgun. Just know you're also making a big single-name and single-country wager, and leaning on a few unprofitable growth names to get there.
If you'd rather own the whole automation supply chain and not lose sleep over any one holding, ROBO is the flatter, more profitable basket. The trade-off is that when a Fanuc or an Nvidia rips, you barely feel it.
One last thing worth noticing. Nvidia turning up as a top-four holding in a robotics fund isn't a fluke. It's the same pattern showing up everywhere the AI buildout touches. If you want to see how far that reaches, from chips to power to data centers, here's the three layers of the AI buildout. And if you just want to line these two up against everything else, the full ETF library is here.