A spin-off where both sides of the table share one owner
Faraday Future said after the close on 28 September that it will move its robotics business into AIxC at a valuation of about US$200 million. AIxC will be renamed FF EAI Robotics Ecosystem Inc. on 30 September, take the ticker FFR, and abandon its cryptocurrency business entirely.
On the same day the company said its car business will shift from building electric vehicles to operating a robotaxi shared-mobility network, and that the group as a whole is being upgraded into a physical AI investment holding company. It cited Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet as models. FFAI shares rose more than 60 per cent after hours at one point on the news, and were still up more than 20 per cent at the time of writing.
Read the transaction documents and the picture changes. The buyer and the seller answer to the same controller. The US$200 million price was set inside that system, and the benefits after closing are distributed mainly inside it too.
AIxC was never an outside shell
In September 2025 Faraday Future and Jia Yueting led a PIPE of about US$41 million into Qualigen. Jia put in roughly US$4 million of his own money for a stake of about 7 per cent. Under the arrangement Jia became chief adviser, Faraday Future president Jerry Wang became co-chief executive, and Faraday Future chief financial officer Koti Meka doubled as CFO. After shareholder approval Faraday Future held about 55 per cent directly, and Faraday Future, Jia, Jerry Wang and related parties together held about 63 per cent.
In November 2025 Jia returned to the Nasdaq exchange in New York. In his weekly investor update he wrote that it was the first time in four years he had stood there, hosting a renaming ceremony for a listed company that Faraday Future had just taken control of. That company was Qualigen Therapeutics, an oncology drug developer. It was renamed AIxCrypto and pivoted to cryptocurrency.
Ten months later it is changing identity again. So when the announcement describes Faraday Future as becoming FFR’s single largest controlling shareholder after the deal, the wording invites the reader to think control is being newly acquired. Faraday Future was already the controlling shareholder.
The announcement calls US$200 million a market valuation. But the transaction needs approval from special committees on both boards, and both companies sit under the same controller. For scale, Faraday Future’s entire market capitalisation before the announcement was a little over US$8 million, according to quote data from CNN and others, less than one twentieth of the price put on this one robotics business. On 24 July the company carried out a one-for-150 reverse share split to keep its Nasdaq listing.
Where the dilution went
Faraday Future says the spin-off will reduce the parent’s reliance on highly dilutive financing and significantly lower the potential dilution facing parent shareholders.
The term sheet shows AIxC issuing new shares at the lower of US$2.246 and the average closing price over the five days before signing. Its indicative fully diluted equity value is about US$55 million.
On our estimate, at US$2.246 the US$200 million consideration equals roughly 89 million new shares, about 3.6 times the existing share capital of AIxC. After closing, the holding of the Faraday Future group rises to about 90 per cent. Against an outside holding of about 37 per cent at the end of last year, outside shareholders would be diluted to roughly 8 per cent, and that includes the outside investors who funded the earlier crypto pivot. The final ratios depend on the definitive agreement and the latest share capital of AIxC.
So the dilution has not disappeared. It has moved from the minority holders of one listed company to the minority holders of another.
552 robots and a US$2,800 average
The company discloses that by the end of August its robotics business had launched 24 FCC-certified products, with cumulative sales and shipments of 552 units and cumulative revenue of about US$1.52 million. That works out at under US$2,800 a unit. Since the company expects 22 per cent of 2026 revenue to come from ecosystem business outside hardware, the real hardware price is probably lower still. That price band normally covers quadruped robot dogs, desktop robotic arms or education devices, not bipedal humanoids.
The press release repeatedly stresses Built in USA. The risk factors at the end of the same document say most robotics products depend on a single contract manufacturer, that all of them depend on Chinese contract manufacturers, and that there is a policy risk of the federal government banning imports of Chinese robot products.
The margin definition also moves. The summary says second-quarter robotics products averaged a gross margin above 30 per cent. The body text changes this to an average contribution margin above 30 per cent. Those are two different measures and cannot be read as the same thing.
Management’s forecasts are more aggressive again. Revenue of about US$7.1 million in 2026 with a positive gross margin, about US$45.17 million in 2027 at a 30.5 per cent gross margin, about US$1.98 billion cumulatively from 2026 to 2030 with gross margin rising to about 54 per cent in 2030, and cumulative shipments above 130,000 units over five years. To hit the 2026 target the company needs at least about US$5.6 million of revenue and about 1,450 units in the four months from September to December, roughly 3.7 times the level of the previous eleven months.
The ticker changed before the asset did
The ticker change is running ahead of the asset purchase. Both boards approved only the signing of a non-binding term sheet. The acquisition itself is not approved and still needs a definitive agreement and the satisfaction of closing conditions. From 30 September, however, the stock trades under the name FF EAI Robotics while the asset behind that name has not been injected.
The new car narrative is equally provisional. The English wording of Faraday Future refers to a potential connection to the Cybercab network and discloses no agreement with Tesla. Earlier this month Tesla published an intent form inviting companies to buy Cybercab fleets or supply infrastructure for its network. Earlier this year Jia said on X that Faraday Future was willing to adopt Tesla FSD across the board, ending the post with a direct mention of Musk and the words Let’s talk.
A script investors have seen before
For anyone who has followed Jia for a long time, the narrative is familiar. From the LeEco era of ecosystem chemical reactions, to the FFAI plus AIXC dual flywheels and dual listed companies of 2025, to today’s Berkshire and Alphabet model, the vocabulary keeps updating. The underlying problem does not. The parent has no core business that generates cash on its own.
Faraday Future concedes in the same filing that there is substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern, that it currently lacks the ability to pay its outstanding debts, that there are material weaknesses in its internal control over financial reporting, and that it has restated its financials.
The Berkshire holding model rests on insurance float. The Alphabet incubation system rests on the stable cash flow of search advertising. The Faraday Future holding platform has neither. Its car and robotics businesses both still depend on outside money. The spin-off looks less like a separation than another financing window opened for the same need.
Governance deserves the same scrutiny. FFR and FFAI plan to sign an investor rights agreement, with governance expected to follow the existing model between FFGP and FFAI. Bloomberg has reported that FF Global Partners is partly managed by Jia and that in 2022 it drove the board control fight at Faraday Future, at a time when the company was under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission following the findings of an internal inquiry and the Department of Justice had also requested information.
Through this strategic upgrade, FF has the opportunity to once again become a driving force in the transformation of the auto industry, Jia said in the announcement.
On 30 September the stock trades under FFR for the first time. The price the market gives it will be the first independent pricing of an asset shuffle conducted inside a single control group.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek Robotics report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.