The Belt 
In 2026, America’s humanoid robot industry stopped showing off and started defending itself. Against whom? The United States now fields at least six serious robot companies: Tesla, Figure, Boston Dynamics, Agility, Apptronik, plus Norway-born, US-landed 1X. Six firms, six completely different technical routes. Rankings are easy to fake. What matters is the choices each company … Read more
Future MCU competition is not just about performance, but who understands the application better, said Yang Ping, marketing director of Nation Technologies, at the Munich Shanghai Electronics Fair. The fair opened on 1 July in Shanghai. Amid the displays, control-chip innovation around robots and AI infrastructure stood out. As an MCU leader in AI, Nation … Read more
Chery’s full takeover of a Nissan factory in South Africa sends a signal: China’s auto exports could top 10 million units and reach 2.5 times Japan’s level. The move shows how Chinese carmakers are not just shipping vehicles abroad but acquiring and operating foreign production assets, a step change in globalisation. For European supply chains … Read more
2026 is the first year of mass production for hybrid, or solid-liquid, batteries. Huang Xuejie, one of China’s leading lithium-battery scientists and convener of the energy-storage direction at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, argues that all-solid-state batteries cannot overturn the table before 2035, so hybrid electrolytes must be taken seriously. … Read more
An Congrong has succeeded Li Shufu as chairman of Geely Auto, in a leadership handover announced at the company’s H1 2026 results briefing on 17 August. Geely Auto Holdings said Li Shufu, chairman of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, resigned as chairman and executive director of Geely Auto, taking the honorary chairman-for-life role while staying chairman … Read more
The embodied-intelligence industry does not lack robots that perform one beautiful demo. What it lacks is robots that repeat the same task ten thousand times in real scenes and stay stable and reliable. Running stably is not one single technology but a complete system covering perception, data, model and execution. PaXini recently disclosed a 1 … Read more
Industrial embodied intelligence at scale just passed a key threshold. Drawing on nearly two decades of manufacturing-scene accumulation, Topstar and Wuwen Zhike built a shared data ecosystem and a complete industrial-data iteration loop, enabling fast iteration, standardised reuse and batch deployment of embodied robots. Wuwen Zhike was among the first to launch a physical-AI data-base … Read more
A good name often hides a company’s ambition. Estun takes its English name from EST (Spanish for east) and UN (one), a No. 1 in the East vision that looked bold in the 1990s when overseas robot makers monopolised China’s market. Did that vision come true? Yes. Estun’s 2025 report shows it held the top … Read more
A report from SAG has re-ranked the humanoid-robot race. The numbers are striking: in the first half of 2026, global humanoid robot shipments reached about 19,100 units, up 272 per cent year on year. Chinese makers took more than 97 per cent of the shipment share, and AgiBot (Zhiyuan) topped the world for the first … Read more
On 5 August, Dobot released Lumeng, which it calls the world’s first embodied all-habitat humanoid robot. Built around the idea of embodied all-habitat, the product aims to break the fixed boundaries of space, scene and function that constrain traditional robots, upgrading humanoids from single-purpose voice-command tools into intelligent agents that fit into homes, education and … Read more