The Belt 
A Shanghai lab says stop brute-forcing compute, and built a brain-inspired world model for robots China’s embodied-AI crowd is starting to ask whether pumping more data and compute is the whole answer, and a Shanghai lab just bet it is not. At the Pujiang Innovation Forum on 14 September, EBKernel launched Cog-WM 1.0, a brain-inspired … Read more
InTime Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Fudan open-sourced HandEdit, a dexterous-hand editing benchmark Training a robot hand used to mean owning the robot, and that bottleneck is exactly why progress stalled. InTime Robotics, with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Fudan University, has now open-sourced HandEdit, a dataset and benchmark that turns ordinary first-person videos of … Read more
Samsung and BYD both backed PaXini, and its tactile-sensor war chest just passed USD 560 million Two of Asia’s most controlling manufacturers just bought the same bet on a robot’s sense of touch, and neither is known for impulse. On 16 September, PaXini, a Shenzhen firm building tactile sensors and perception for humanoid robots, completed … Read more
D-Robotics closes a USD 400 million Series C as Horizon’s robotics arm bets on the compute floor China’s robotics builders are about to get a great deal more silicon underneath them, and the capital is arriving from Seoul and the Gulf as much as from Shenzhen. On 17 September, D-Robotics, the robotics-computing arm spun out … Read more
Shenzhen’s embodied-AI ‘little giants’ get a policy backstop to go global Global demand for embodied intelligence is surging, and Shenzhen’s commercial-robotics firms are racing to claim overseas ground on the strength of hard tech. But longer payment cycles, opaque foreign buyers and the risk of default or bankruptcy still top the list of worries for … Read more
On 22 August at the Ice Ribbon arena in Beijing, as the second World Humanoid Robot Games opened, CCTV cut to a real tennis court. A humanoid stood on the baseline. A ball came at more than 50 kilometres per hour. In milliseconds it judged the landing point, moved its feet, turned its body and … Read more
While China’s robot market debates overcapacity and price wars, a group of domestic robot rental and sales operators has taken the business overseas. Demand for overseas event and ceremony work is rising, with an operator reporting that a single Unitree U2 humanoid can command more than RMB 20,000 a day abroad, several times the domestic … Read more
The humanoid robot trade is losing its illusion. Unitree listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August as the A-share market’s first humanoid robot stock, but the first-day high quickly turned into a slide in price and market value, and a full moon became a crescent. Unitree’s market value has fallen roughly 57 per cent … Read more
Hangzhou-based Xieyue Intelligent, or Leap Intelligence, has closed a nine-figure angel-plus round, with Linear Capital, Junshan Capital, Hongyi Capital and Hidden Hill Capital participating. The money will fund embodied foundation-model training, compute and data infrastructure, team expansion, and home-robot hardware development with scenario validation. Leap Intelligence is building a home robot on an embodied foundation … Read more
OpenAI is in talks with investors over a new private round at a valuation of about USD 1.2 trillion. Whether that number holds depends on whether its initial public offering, now pushed to 2027, can clear the same level. The proposed valuation would add roughly USD 350 billion to the USD 852 billion post-money mark … Read more