The Belt Jaime Xiao on the infrastructure behind a rain alert that counts down the minutes: roughly 70,000 automatic weather stations, one of the densest Doppler radar networks anywhere, and a family in Sichuan who got six minutes’ notice to bring in a year of rice while the sun was still out.
Jaime Xiao on what a Chinese city does when land stops paying: it gives away flats, offices and patient capital to anyone with a doctorate and a start-up the city has already backed. The housing bubble did not end the municipal business model. It changed the asset class.
A robot company eight months old, which had announced close to RMB 1 billion of orders, has been accused of failing to pay wages at all. On 23 October the National Business Daily reported that staff at Nanjing Wujing Dynamics allege three to four dozen employees are owed close to RMB 8 million in total, … Read more
On 23 October Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Beijing robot company Songyan Dynamics had filed confidentially for a Hong Kong initial public offering aiming to raise several hundred million US dollars. A listing could come as early as next year. Discussions are continuing and size and timing may change. The company … Read more
The share price of China’s largest domestic industrial robot maker doubled in three months, hit a record, then gave back about 40 per cent in the following three. The round trip is the market repeatedly re-pricing Estun’s ability to convert volume into profit. On 30 September Estun published an incentive plan priced at half the … Read more
Two things happened on the same day in different places, and read together they explain more than either does alone. On 23 October JPMorgan published a note titled Tesla Optimus ramp more gradual, selective on humanoid supply chain. Its read on production at the Fremont plant was blunt. Guidance is for 10,000 to 20,000 units. … Read more
San Francisco-based Bedrock Robotics has closed a USD 600 million Series C led jointly by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund, and Emergence Capital, with Temasek, Nvidia and Bessemer participating. The round values the company at USD 4.1 billion, and brings total funding to roughly USD 1 billion in a little over two years. The obvious reading … Read more
A humanoid robot that can perform a backflip may still be unable to put down an egg gently. Cameras can locate an object and a large model can plan a path to it. The problem starts at contact. The robot does not know how much force it is applying, whether the object is slipping, or … Read more
A bipedal robot runs for one to two hours on a charge, and most of that charge is spent staying upright. LimX Dynamics has built a version that skips the problem by removing the legs. The Shenzhen embodied robotics company worked with ZINOVA, a physical AI developer, on a hybrid configuration that takes LimX’s TRON … Read more
INTILION, a European energy storage solutions provider, has signed a memorandum of understanding with CATL covering 3GWh of sodium-ion storage systems over the next five years in the German-speaking market. The deployment covers Germany, Switzerland and Austria, with product going to grid-level peak shaving and commercial and industrial storage. The agreement covers 3GWh of CATL’s … Read more