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
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
Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance (HIMA) and Seres have responded to a change in how the AITO brand is run. Product definition, product design, brand marketing, channel retail and after-sales service will be led by Seres, with Huawei’s consumer unit contributing enablement. HIMA confirmed AITO’s new operating model on 15 September. (Source: Chedongxi) AITO remains part … Read more
A new round of consolidation among China’s state-owned carmakers has actually started. On 14 September, GAC Group said it had signed a letter of intent with FAW Car Co to buy part of a joint-venture vehicle company held by FAW through a share issue, alongside a supporting fundraising. GAC confirmed the FAW share deal in … Read more
Estun has topped China’s industrial-robot shipment rankings again, and this time crossed a threshold no domestic brand had reached: more than 10,000 robots delivered in a single quarter. According to MIR DATABANK, in the first half of 2026 Estun again led all brands in China’s industrial-robot shipments. In the second quarter it became the first … Read more
Industrial embodied intelligence just cleared a practical hurdle. Topstar, a Dongguan-based smart-manufacturing equipment maker, has built a complete industrial data-iteration loop with Wuwen Zhike, a physical-AI data-platform company — letting embodied robots iterate quickly, reuse standardized components and deploy at batch scale. Wuwen Zhike was among the first in the sector to ship a physical-AI … Read more
Hikvision’s 2026 interim report, released this week, offered a clean read on where China’s robotics segment is heading. The surveillance giant posted group revenue of 46.82 billion yuan, up 11.97 percent year on year, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 7.90 billion yuan, up 39.57 percent, and gross margin climbing to 49.97 percent. The … Read more
Another robotics company has knocked on the door of the Hong Kong stock exchange. Standard Robots, a Shenzhen-based maker of industrial autonomous mobile robots, has submitted a prospectus for a main-board listing. If it gets through, it would become Hong Kong’s first “industrial embodied-AI” listing. By the numbers, the company is no minnow. According to … Read more
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, China’s embodied-AI zone was full of robots making coffee, taking photos and dancing. Sudo Tech’s booth drew crowds for the opposite reason: its robots quietly did unglamorous things — grasping objects, wrapping items in cloth with two hands, inserting parts into matching holes — with conspicuous stability, success rates and … Read more
After 12 years and roughly $3.2 billion in cumulative funding (per Tracxn data), Faraday Future has delivered fewer than 20 vehicles. Now the Jia Yueting-led company is abandoning the EV label altogether: an August shareholder meeting will vote on a renaming that rebrands FF as a “physical AI ecosystem company,” with humanoid and embodied-AI robots … Read more