A humanoid played real tennis against a Grand Slam champion, and the breakthrough was the data

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

A humanoid rents for USD 280 a day at home and USD 2,800 in the Gulf, and that gap is the business

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

Unitree’s 57 per cent slide and a quiet IPO crackdown mark the humanoid reset

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

Li Auto’s former AI chief raises again for home robots seven months after founding

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 shopping a $1.2 trillion private round while its IPO slips to 2027

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

UBTECH’s super factory builds robots with robots, one unit every ten minutes

UBTECH’s industrial humanoid-robot super factory began production on 12 September in Liuzhou’s northern eco-industrial new area in Guangxi. The plant, the first humanoid-robot smart-manufacturing benchmark built for ten-thousand-unit capacity, runs on industrial simulation planning and a digital scheduling brain, putting the “robots building robots” model into practice. It marks the shift of China’s humanoid industry … Read more

Shangwei’s 23-fold rerating shows how a wind-resin maker became the A-share face of humanoids

Shangwei New Material listed on the STAR Market in September 2020 and became one of its most undervalued names. Institutions low-balled the IPO, raising only RMB 70 million, a record low, at the RMB 1 billion market-cap floor. For years it sat near RMB 24 billion, about RMB 78 a share, with no coverage and … Read more

Hai Robotics restarts its Hong Kong IPO with RMB 4.1 billion of orders and a loss to price away

Warehouse automation leader Hai Robotics refreshed its listing application on 13 September, restarting its Hong Kong IPO and positioning itself as a candidate for the first automated case-handling robot listing on the exchange, following an initial filing in February 2026. Hai Robotics targets case-handling automation in high-density warehouses. (Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0) Before … Read more

Guangdong sets RMB 200 billion cross-border data target as it builds a Greater Bay data zone

On 15 September, Guangdong’s Digital Government and Data Bureau released the “Guangdong Greater Bay Area Data Special Zone Work Plan”, targeting a cross-border data industry above RMB 200 billion by the end of 2028, with related value-add in manufacturing and services exceeding RMB 1 trillion. Bordering Hong Kong and Macao, Guangdong is a national digital-economy … Read more

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan for smart EVs sets a 2030 finish line and a hard list of numbers

China’s intelligent connected new-energy vehicle industry now has a specific plan for the 15th Five-Year Plan period. MIIT and eight other departments issued the plan for the industry’s development, a document that sets the sector’s direction through 2030. Nine departments issued the 15th Five-Year plan for intelligent connected NEVs. (Source: Chedongxi) The plan calls intelligent … Read more