Humanoid robots in 2026: output frenzy, deployment doubt

100,000 units, or a fivefold leap Halfway through 2026, the humanoid industry turned in a glossy scorecard. At July’s WAIC press conference, MIIT vice-minister Gan Xiaobin said full-year output could exceed 100,000 units. From about 20,000 in 2025 to 100,000 is a fivefold jump any sector would envy. Fellow vice-minister Ke Jixin called it a … Read more

Why the US FCC came for Chinese robot vacuums

A list that caught a vacuum On 28 July, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) updated its Covered List with two new categories: foreign-made advanced robot devices (including humanoids, quadrupeds and other mobile robots) and networked power inverters. No company is named, but the definition lands squarely on China’s most exportable robot categories. The telling … Read more

AgiBot’s Luo Jianlan leaves as it chases Hong Kong IPO

The IPO that finally surfaced AgiBot (Zhiyuan Innovation), the humanoid star that repeatedly denied Hong Kong IPO rumours, finally confirmed in late July that it had started the listing process. Good news followed: its self-developed WITA-Omni Preview model topped Qwen, Gemini, Doubao and Nvidia with an 85.21 score, and it launched the world’s first robot … Read more

NIO, XPeng and Li Auto bet on embodied AI after EVs

A second act, from cars to bodies On 29 July, reports said Li Auto was planning two-wheeled and bipedal robots, and its shares rose 10 percent that day. XPeng’s own share rallies have likewise tracked robot news. The pattern shows a shift in the underlying story: the three newcomers, NIO, XPeng and Li Auto (collectively … Read more

SK Hynix and SanDisk want to put 512 GiB of flash next to your GPU and call it HBF

HBM proved the trick HBM has shown that stacking and co-packaging storage media close to the GPU can relieve the data-movement bottleneck in AI compute. Now SK Hynix and SanDisk are applying the same idea to NAND, using HBF to put large-capacity flash next to GPUs and other xPUs in order to relieve the inference … Read more