Analysis
BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo said robotics has become one of the fastest-growing parts of QNX, the company's real-time operating system business, as it expands beyond its long-standing automotive foundation into industrial automation, warehouse robotics and medical devices, CNBC reported. QNX currently powers more than 275 million cars globally, giving BlackBerry an unusually large embedded-software installed base for a company whose consumer smartphone business collapsed more than a decade ago.
The pivot makes sense on the merits of what QNX actually is: a real-time, safety-certified operating system built for environments where a software failure has physical consequences -- an airbag that has to deploy in milliseconds, a car's braking system, and now increasingly a warehouse robot or surgical device that has to behave predictably around humans. That safety-certification requirement is a much higher bar than the reliability standards for typical enterprise or consumer software, and it takes years to build the certification track record QNX already has from automotive.
BlackBerry's broader business, per earlier reporting, has been repositioned around this kind of AI-resistant, safety-critical software -- security and infrastructure software that benefits from rather than gets displaced by AI adoption, since more autonomous physical systems need more of exactly this kind of certified real-time control layer underneath them, not less.
“QNX's automotive pedigree is a legitimate credential in that market, not just a legacy business looking for a new growth narrative.”
- BlackBerry QNX -- real-time OS with 275M+ cars as its installed base, now expanding into robotics, industrial automation and medical devices
- Wind River, Green Hills Software -- competing real-time OS vendors in safety-critical embedded systems
- Robotics and physical-AI startups -- the emerging customer base for QNX's expansion, needing certified control software beneath their AI models rather than building it themselves
The category-level dynamic supports the pivot: physical AI and robotics funding has surged industry-wide in 2026, and every humanoid robot, warehouse automation system or surgical robot needs a real-time control layer that meets safety-certification standards well beyond what a general-purpose Linux distribution provides. QNX's automotive pedigree is a legitimate credential in that market, not just a legacy business looking for a new growth narrative.
The counterweight is that BlackBerry's automotive QNX business, while an installed-base leader, has historically produced modest revenue relative to the company's market capitalization aspirations, and 'fastest-growing segment' language from a CEO doesn't specify what base rate that growth is measured against -- a small robotics business growing fast off a small starting point is a different story than a business already at meaningful scale.
BlackBerry's fiscal Q3 earnings call, expected in December, is the first date it could break out robotics-segment revenue separately from the 275-million-car automotive base -- until that line item exists, 'fastest-growing' is a claim about direction, not a number anyone outside the company can check.
