Reborn in 2010, the AI ​​in my mind is too powerful.

After receiving the notification from JPMorgan Chase, Chen Yiran did not immediately look at the sent materials, since he was still on holiday.

It wasn't until the tenth day of the Lunar New Year that Mr. and Mrs. Chen could no longer bear the lack of braised food for breakfast, so they flew back to Beijing.

Chen Yiran flew back to Silicon Valley and officially started working.

Four days have passed since JPMorgan Chase notified him, and in that short time, several more companies have come to him seeking financial support.

Chen Yiran looked at the information sent by Datong on the computer with a bit of helplessness.

First up is KUKA, the fourth oldest robot manufacturer. There's not much to say about it; its business is doing well, and its technology is a great addition.

Price wasn't a big problem either; JPMorgan Chase, Apple, and Bain provided him with $11 billion to squander.

Moreover, none of Aurora Group's businesses are currently losing money, and its annual cash flow is very stable.

But the information he received later made him hesitate. Four of the companies seemed to have decent technology, but they all looked somewhat shabby and on the verge of bankruptcy. The other two had considerable reputations, but they were also a bit questionable.

The first one is Shadow Robot Company.

They are a company in London, England that makes simulated dexterous hands. Their Shadow Hand product has 24 degrees of freedom, with all five fingers independently driven and tactile sensors at the fingertips.

Technically, they are indeed world-class, but the team has fewer than 30 people and is on the verge of bankruptcy every year.

The product is too expensive; a single Shadow Hand robot costs hundreds of thousands of US dollars, more expensive than many complete industrial robots. Only a handful of customers can afford it, all of whom are research institutions, and the order volume is extremely small.

The second is Sarcos Robotics, a technology company founded in Salt Lake City, USA in 1983.

It had never been profitable for over 20 years and had been burning through cash. It was acquired by Raytheon in 2007, but the burning continued.

The concept of powered exoskeletons sounds appealing and looks cool, with claims that soldiers wearing them can carry 200-pound ammunition boxes for miles without getting tired.

However, the actual products are unusable. Right now, they only have military contracts worth around $100,000 each, obtained through connections. Raytheon has no choice but to sell them off.

The third is Clearpath Robotics, located in Waterloo, Canada, a new team established in 2009.

They primarily develop the underlying platform for unmanned ground vehicles, which, like many other promising concepts, involve intelligent mobile robots with autonomous navigation capabilities, potentially applicable to military, industrial, and agricultural fields. However, they are currently far from achieving this level of sophistication, offering only limited improvements over exoskeletons.

The company now only has a few dozen employees and is barely surviving on orders from a few university laboratories.

Fourth, Aldebaran Robotics, a company based in romantic Paris.

The NAO series, made by companies that create humanoid intelligent robots, is quite popular. It stands half a meter tall and is equipped with 25 degrees of freedom and over 100 sensors.

Its outward-facing design makes it as appealing as a toy, and it was chosen as the official robot for the Robot World Cup. It has been purchased by hundreds of universities worldwide for teaching purposes, but it still struggles to survive.

Social robots and educational robots are not yet a market, strictly speaking. Each NAO costs around ten thousand US dollars, and research institutions and schools will not buy too many, so the volume is not high.

They are also developing an even larger humanoid robot, Romeo, which is burning through even more money.

All four companies are burning through cash; none of them can support themselves.

Chen Yiran carefully reviewed the data from each company and then discussed it with Jasmine.

"What do you think? This might actually help build your body in the future, so give me some feedback."

I think Aldebaran Robotics is excellent and should be acquired.

"Uh, you're not saying this because you think their robots look good, are you?"

"How could that be? They don't fit my aesthetic! I actually think that humanoid robots are definitely not the best form of robots. Dog or octopus shapes are better."

However, their company's robots can be sold to various universities and research institutions, providing us with a lot of data feedback, which is very important. As for the other three companies, it depends on the situation; buying them would just save some trouble, as none of them have an absolute technological advantage.

After thinking about it for a while, Chen Yiran decided to just buy them all.

Anyway, it's not expensive. He doesn't really have a sense of the total cost of these four companies combined, but he thinks it might be more than two or three hundred million US dollars.

Finally, Chen Yiran turned his attention to the last two companies, one of which was iRobot, founded in 1990 by three robotics experts from MIT.

They are one of the few robotics companies that are doing relatively well, and they have two mature business lines.

One aspect is the consumer side; they launched the world's first mass-produced robotic vacuum cleaner in 2002. By 2011, they had sold over 6 million units globally, capturing 60% of the US market.

From this perspective, the acquisition is a very logical thing to do, because Aurora will soon launch a whole-house interconnection system, and the robot vacuum cleaner is a very important part of it.

However, their other business line is more troublesome, which is military robots.

They received a contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1998 to develop tactical mobile robots.

They then launched the PackBot robot, which entered the World Trade Center ruins to participate in the search and rescue during the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The results were very successful, and it can be said that it became famous overnight.

Therefore, the US military began to purchase them in large quantities and deployed them for the first time in 2002. PackBots were subsequently deployed in large numbers to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq for tasks such as mine clearance, explosive ordnance disposal, and reconnaissance.

During the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in March 2011, PackBot was also deployed to detect radiation; it was the first robot to enter the building after the accident.

But everyone has their moment of glory; don't mistake one moment for eternity.

In 2011, the US military began withdrawing from Afghanistan, and iRobot lost 60% of its revenue.

As publicly traded companies, their stock prices have begun to fluctuate downwards.

However, the news of Chen Yiran establishing Aurora caused a significant surge in their stock price, and they hoped to sell themselves while the price was high.

Chen Yiran is very interested in them, but the approval process for buying from them may take a long time, after all, they are legitimate suppliers to the US military.

Buy, buy, buy! Don't be afraid! We were planning to militarize anyway, so it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Chen Yiran sighed. It wasn't that he had some kind of mental fastidiousness about not selling weapons; he just found it too troublesome.

However, as his business grew, he realized that he could not completely distance himself from politics.

In that case, military products are necessary, and they must be needed by both major powers in order to achieve greater prosperity.

"Alright, alright, no problem. Our company's shareholders are very powerful. That means they'll buy the first five, so now only this last one, the ancient god, is left."

Chen Yiran waved his hand, and the file on the computer screen switched to the last one: Boston Dynamics.