Ant Group’s robotics arm Lingbo is raising 1.5 billion yuan for the robot brain

The brain, not the body Lingbo was founded in December 2024 as a wholly owned Ant Group unit with 100 million yuan of registered capital. Its thesis mirrors that of US firm Physical Intelligence: do not build the hardware, build the general intelligence that any robot can run. In July it released the LingBot 2.0 … Read more

DJI is finally entering the robot vacuum market with Romo

Four years in the making DJI first started a ground-cleaning robot project in 2020, and reports of an imminent launch have circulated since late 2024. The Romo family is expected to span standard, advanced and flagship tiers with features such as auto water refill, and pre-orders have already opened. DJI’s pitch leans on a simple … Read more

Shenzhen opens China’s first ‘five-party’ autonomous-delivery pilot

From testing to ecosystem The move marks a shift in how Shenzhen frames autonomous driving. After a city-wide pilot plan in 2024 and a ‘4123’ blueprint in 2025, the 2026 ‘five-party’ model adds a governance-and-operation structure on top of the technology. The city is explicitly moving from a phase of proving the vehicles work to … Read more

Phone chips are slumping: Qualcomm and MediaTek shipments both fall more than 25 per cent

Counterpoint Research reports that global smartphone SoC shipments fell 15 per cent in the first half of 2026, hit by surging memory prices, cautious inventory control and longer replacement cycles. MediaTek held the top share at 32 per cent, Qualcomm was second at 22 per cent, Apple 19 per cent, UNISOC 13 per cent and … Read more

China’s open-source AI models top the global usage charts

Calls and downloads ‘Calls’ mean individuals who lack local deployment pay per token to use a model online. ‘Downloads’ are organisations, banks, governments and energy firms pulling models in to embed in their own systems, the core ‘AI plus’ indicator, and China leads there as well. Across Africa, with 1,500 to 3,000 languages, many local-language … Read more

Huawei’s chief semiconductor scientist breaks his silence and praises DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng

The forerunner’s bet Liao frames the past 30 years as two vertical lines, the processor line from CPU to AI and the connectivity line from telephone to mobile network, with a counter-intuitive proposition: the more successful and monopolised the application layer, the more the underlying chip withers, because a dominant customer sets direction and a … Read more

Google and Tesla just posted negative free cash flow. The AI bill is coming due

The numbers Both companies turned free cash flow negative for the first time. Google’s was minus 5.9 billion dollars, its first negative since the 2004 IPO. Tesla’s was minus 1.1 billion, its first in about two years. The driver is capital expenditure: Google’s second-quarter capex doubled to 44.9 billion dollars, nearly 5 billion a day, … Read more

Shanghai’s Kepler Robotics skips the IPO queue and chooses a merger instead

Why Kelin picked Kepler The power and electricity track is the most certain, largest humanoid landing spot, and State Grid tenders are concentrated in the tens of billions of yuan, shifting competition toward scenario fit and scaled delivery. Kelin has spent years in the grid and energy system, holding national grid government-enterprise channels, industry access … Read more

The US just regulated Unitree’s new robots. The real test is elsewhere

Not a border ban Unitree secured CSRC approval for its listing on 2 July, but under the FCC rule its new US-bound products face fresh access questions. It flagged the US market risk in its updated prospectus on 31 July. The US was 18.39, 19.54 and 13.30 per cent of revenue in 2023, 2024 and … Read more

The dexterous-hand ‘shovel seller’: how Lingxin bets on everyone else’s robot gold rush

The bottleneck everyone argues about The hand is the most visible choke point of embodied intelligence. As early as 2018 OpenAI admitted that contact, friction and damping are hard to simulate accurately, and Musk has said the forearm and hand are harder to build than the rest of the robot combined. Every gain in degrees … Read more