China
News on China's humanoid robot industry: Unitree, UBTech, AgiBot, Fourier and others, plus factory deployments, funding and Beijing's robotics policy.
Humanoid Daily
Figure's baby AGI, Meta's China gamble, China 5Xs physical AI investment, and Agility goes to Wall Street
Nov 3, 2026China
AGIBOT's 24-hour convenience store test: what 6 humanoid robots can do
Nov 3, 2026China
Meta built a humanoid robot with Fourier Trump declared that a security risk three days earlier ...
Nov 2, 2026More China
Washington targets robot imports, Agility goes public, $20 billion valuation, and home insurance for humanoids
Today in Humanoid (almost) Daily ... Washington declares robot imports a national security threat, Agility Robotics heads to Nasdaq next week. AGIBOT wants to change how we measure robot work, Hyundai Mobis bets big on robot joints, Bleu Robotics gets €5 million to teach robots faster, there's more than 1,100 jobs training robots, humanoid robots can now get home insurance, and the number of the day: $20 billion, zero revenue.
XPENG starts producing solid-state batteries for its IRON humanoid robot
XPENG's robotics unit has completed small-scale production of a solid-state battery for the IRON robot that is 30% lighter and 30% more energy-dense than liquid lithium-ion as it targets mass production of IRON by end of 2026.
Oct 30, 2026Europe's first humanoid robot factory is in Serbia, and it's Chinese
AGIBOT and Minth Group opened Europe's first humanoid robot mass-production facility in Šabac, Serbia in August 2025, weeks after the US banned Chinese robots on national security grounds. One year in, it looks like one of the shrewder strategic moves in the industry.
Oct 29, 2026Unitree's first post-IPO earnings: 70% revenue growth, R&D spend up 250%
Unitree posted 665 million yuan in Q3 revenue, up 70% year over year. Net profit fell 17% and missed analyst consensus by half. The explanation is R&D spending up 250% in a single quarter, which is either alarming or exactly right depending on your view of the next 2 years.
Oct 28, 2026What 86 Chinese executives really think about humanoid robots
Morgan Stanley's first AlphaWise survey of Chinese industrial buyers found 62% want humanoid robots but 77% are unsatisfied with current products. The ball is in the robot makers' court: improve humanoids and reduce costs.
Oct 26, 2026Striding AI plans to reinvest retail with robots, $100M of investment, and a massive 7-Eleven franchisee
Striding AI was founded in February 2026, closed a $100 million angel round in June, and unveiled a three-robot system for 24/7 retail operations at APRCE on October 8. The Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group, which operates 7-Eleven franchise stores across Asia, is a co-founder and anchor investor.
Oct 23, 2026IDC: American humanoid robot makers face a 2028 squeeze under FCC robot ban
IDC projects US humanoid revenue 58% below baseline by 2030, because fast product cycles leave few certified models to keep shipping. US builders won’t reach scale until late 2028, which leaves an opening for component suppliers.
Oct 22, 2026Unitree's wild stock ride triggers warning from CEO
Unitree Robotics IPO'd at $9 billion, briefly hit $66 billion on debut, crashed 60%, then rebounded. Now trading at nearly 10 times its sector's average P/E, the company filed a formal risk warning. Here's what the valuation reveals about the humanoid robot race.
Oct 22, 2026Schaeffler's China factory: humanoid robots building parts for humanoid robots
The German precision parts maker opened a 7,500-square-meter facility in Taicang on October 20, 2026, where 6 humanoid robots assemble the actuators that go inside other humanoid robots. It is the most structurally literal example of the industry's self-referential supply chain.
Oct 20, 2026The $400 humanoid, Digit the forklift, Germany's robot gyms, and 6 chip companies focusing on humanoid robots
Today in Humanoid Daily ... a new $400 humanoid powered by a smartphone, Digit 5 is the forklift of humanoids, Germany's robot billionaire is building robot gyms, China unveils a 13-foot humanoid robot that lifts half a ton, and the number of the day is 6 ... 6 chip companies focusing on robots.
Hong Kong bets HK$10 billion on becoming the world's humanoid robot testing ground
Hong Kong just launched an embodied AI hub with Unitree, AgiBot, Galbot, and Robotera as partners, backed by a HK$10 billion government industrial fund. The pitch: a bridge between Chinese hardware makers and global markets.
Oct 16, 2026Galbot's humanoid already runs 200 stores in China. It just opened 3 more in Hong Kong.
Beijing's Galbot isn't just piloting robot-run convenience stores. It's already operating 200 of them in China, and recently brought its Xiaogai humanoid to Hong Kong. This might just be Galbot's most valuable asset.
Oct 15, 2026Linkerbot ships 10,000 robot hands, hits $3B valuation
Chinese startup Linkerbot is building 20-DOF robot hands for $980 to $14,700, has 80%+ market share in China, and is now racing toward a $6 billion valuation after closing at $3B in April 2026.
Oct 15, 2026Unitree's founder tested GPT-6 on robots ... the results might have been too good to report
Wang Xingxing ran GPT-6 on Unitree robots at the China International Industry Fair and moved his embodied AI tipping point -- the moment robots become so general-purpose that they can perform most tasks in most environments without retraining -- from 2-3 years to 1-2 years.
Oct 12, 2026DeepSeek is leading a $400 million seed round for a stealth robot AI startup
DeepSeek, which disrupted the LLM market with R1, is leading a $400M seed round for Winverse AI, a stealth embodied intelligence startup founded by Hu Han, former head of Tencent's vision-language and embodied foundation model teams.
Oct 12, 2026BYD goes big in humanoid robots with 4,000 engineers, NVIDIA makes robots smarter, and much more
Today in Humanoid Daily ... BYD reportedly has 4,000 engineers (!!!!) building humanoids, NVIDIA gives robots longer memories for vastly better physical AI, SafeWorld raises $12M for robot safety, Italy launches a factory humanoid named Luca, Denmark puts humanoids on the night shift, and the number of the day is $40.
BYD's first humanoid robot design just surfaced
BYD filed a design patent for its humanoid robot this week, giving us the first official look. Behind it: 4,000 engineers, a seventh-generation prototype, a self-developed 4nm chip, and a target of 20,000 internal factory deployments by year-end.
Oct 10, 2026Renting a humanoid robot in China now costs $40 a day, down 80% in 1 year
China's Golden Week 2026 confirmed the biggest trend in global robotics: humanoid rental prices fell 80% in one year, dedicated exchanges are scaling fast, and the market infrastructure for robot-as-a-service is taking shape.
Oct 10, 2026China's Lumos Robotics says it staged the world's first fully autonomous robot theater
A Shenzhen startup founded in 2024 put its NIX humanoid robots on stage for a 45-minute autonomous theatrical performance with reportedly no remote operators. Entertainment is becoming a real vertical for robots, and TrendForce says the business model already works out to a 6-8 month payback.
Oct 9, 2026New UBTECH, VW project: humanoid robots will help mass customize cars
Two years into a working deployment at FAW-Volkswagen's Qingdao plant, UBTECH has just formalized the relationship with a strategic cooperation agreement covering both logistics and smart manufacturing. The most interesting bit: humanoid robots will help the auto makers build more customized and personalized cars ... something that standard automation and assembly lines struggles to do.
Oct 8, 2026China controls 94% of the permanent magnets in a humanoid robot
A new supply chain review finds that Western humanoid manufacturers entering mass production face a structural dependency on Chinese rare earth magnets so deep it could triple unit costs ... and no one has a near-term fix.
Oct 7, 2026Top 10 countries globally for industrial robots: who's growing, who's falling behind
China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, 59% of the global total and nearly 3X the next four countries combined. The US passed Japan for second place but still imports most of its robots. Japan and Europe are sliding, while India is rising fast, according to the IFR's World Robotics 2026 report.
Oct 5, 2026Robots assembling robots: UBTECH's Liuzhou factory will make 1 humanoid every 10 minutes
UBTECH opened a 14,000-square-meter factory in Guangxi where Walker S humanoids help build more Walker S humanoids at a pace no one in the industry has hit before.
Oct 5, 2026Galbot is selling a humanoid robot for $11,000 base. The compute that makes it interesting is more
Galbot opened pre-orders for the ET1 bipedal humanoid on JD.com: Standard at 79,000 yuan ($11,100), Pro at 139,000 yuan ($19,600), Flagship at 179,000 yuan ($25,200). The tier structure is a compute-gated upsell: the watch-and-learn system that can mirror a human dancer in real time is locked to the Pro and above, requiring NVIDIA Orin Nano to run.
Oct 2, 2026This Chinese startup says teleoperation is poisoning humanoid robot training data
MindOn, a 16-month-old Shenzhen AI company with $14M raised, argues that training robots with teleoperation produces unnaturally slow movements ... and that human motion capture is the fix.
Oct 1, 2026New IDC data: humanoid robot shipments up 432% year over year, jobs for robots, and much more ...
Today in Humanoid Daily ... Singapore puts humanoids on the police beat, Korea wants 200,000 robots by 2030, the U.S. Army and Ukraine push robots toward military use, robots are moving into hospitals and homes, and today's number of the day is 25,000. As in ... shipped robots, up 432% year over year.
Tesla's Optimus costs $46,000 with China. Without China, it's $131,000
Tesla's humanoid robot is already deeply embedded in China's manufacturing ecosystem. Removing it would nearly triple the unit cost.
Sep 30, 2026Japan made one of the world's first humanoid robots. Now it's buying from China
Japan Airlines, Honda, and Hitachi are deploying Chinese-made humanoid robots to solve a labor crisis. And the country that gave the world ASIMO is now watching its domestic robotics industry scramble to catch up.
Sep 28, 2026Inside China's robot schools: 70 training grounds where humanoids drill 45 skills up to 600 times a day
China has built a state-backed network of 70-plus embodied AI training facilities where competing robot manufacturers train side by side and feed data into a shared national pool — a structural advantage no private US company has an equivalent for.
Sep 28, 2026Open-RAIL connects VLA models and humanoids, smoothing and speeding motion
China Mobile has open-sourced Open-RAIL, middleware that lets humanoid robots keep moving smoothly while big VLA and world action models compute their next move. The team claims 100X less jerky joint motion, up to 2.09X faster execution and task success as high as 95%.
Sep 24, 2026