China's humanoid robot boom: What to know

Anthropomorphic robots took center stage during China's Spring Festival Gala as the country rang in the Year of the Horse before hundreds of millions of viewers. Units manufactured by Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics vaulted, kicked and engaged in choreographed sparring matches, wowing many and drawing concern from others over how fluidly they moved compared with their stiff-jointed counterparts at last year's gala. China already leads the field in industrial robots -- a different but vital category. Almost 300,000 industrial robots -- or 54 percent of the world's total -- were installed in Chinese factories in 2024, the last year for which full figures are available, according to the Frankfurt-based International Federation of Robotics. The Spring Gala sought to show domestic audiences and foreign onlookers that China is pulling ahead on the humanoid robot front as well. China registered more than 451,000 companies involved in intelligent robotics by the end of 2024, a 19.39 percent year-on-year increase from the same period in 2023, with total registered capital of about $884 billion, according to the State Administration for Market Regulation. "The leap this year showcases the strength of China's innovation system," Lizzi Lee, a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, told Newsweek. "It reflects engineering excellence, speed, scale, and an extraordinarily dense supply chain working in sync. China has built an ecosystem where the path from prototype to product moves at a pace that's hard to match." While debate over China's state subsidies has resurfaced, industry insiders say the real driver of progress is the hardware supply chain clustered around the Pearl and Yangtze River deltas. "China's robots aren't advancing this fast because of some grand government masterplan. It's the same reason the U.S. leads in AI: infrastructure," wrote Rui Xu, a former tech executive at Xiaomi and ByteDance with experience in both the U.S. and Chinese robotics sectors. "When Unitree wants to test a new joint design, they walk down the street," he added. "That's why China shipped 90 percent of the approximately 13,000 humanoid robots sold globally last year. That's why Unitree's G1 costs $16,000 while Tesla's Optimus Gen2 will be over $20,000." Investors are betting that volume will follow. Morgan Stanley expects Chinese humanoid robot sales to reach 28,000 units this year -- more than double the investment bank's earlier estimate. Newsweek has contacted Unitree for comment by email. Despite the spectacle, scripted kung fu is only one facet of embodied intelligence, or AI systems such as robots, autonomous vehicles and drones that operate in the physical world. The greater challenge lies in general-purpose reasoning in unpredictable environments -- the type of capability Chinese policymakers envision for humanoids deployed in homes, nursing facilities and other real-world settings. "Much of China's strength today sits in hardware integration and control systems," Lee said. "The frontier in open-ended, generalizable intelligence for physical AI is still very much in flux globally, and no country has fully cracked it." The display also raised questions about how much of what viewers saw was autonomous versus remotely controlled. "If you see robots that are running a marathon, you always see people running next to them. Of course walking upright is something the technology supports, but the direction and the speed -- the control -- that's remote controlled," Susanne Bieller, the general secretary of the International Federation of Robotics, told Newsweek. "If you see the robots dancing like [on Monday], what you can do is put a human in a motion capture suit and then have the robot imitate those movements. It's relatively easy to let the robot copy what the human is doing," Bieller said, adding that remote control was another possibility. The emergence of these robots has also raised safety concerns. A Unitree Robotics H1 model went viral last year after suddenly flailing its limbs in a factory, toppling equipment and forcing employees to back away. In another incident that year, an elderly woman was almost headbutted by a Unitree robot at a lantern festival event in Guangdong province. Earlier this month, video circulated of what appeared to be another Unitree robot malfunctioning, collapsing in spasms and appearing to kick a man in the face and injuring him. "If something went wrong [at the Spring Gala] and one robot tumbled, the next robot probably would not have been able to react," Bieller said. "There were humans next to those robots dancing, and if something does not go exactly according to plan, I don't want to see it." Outside China, she added, "you hardly see human-sized humanoids unless they are behind fences or glass walls because they are unsafe -- they are not safe to work next to humans." In a 2023 policy document, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology described humanoid robots as a "disruptive product" following computers, smartphones and electric vehicles, and it laid out targets through 2025 and 2027 for breakthroughs in AI "brains," motion-control systems, dexterous limbs and mass-produced whole-machine platforms. "Humanoid robots will become an important new engine of economic growth," the document said. The plan calls for expanding real-world applications in manufacturing, logistics, medical care and high-risk operations, while building standards, testing systems and establishing regional industrial clusters. It also urges greater financing and international cooperation to strengthen supply chains and push humanoids from demonstration to deployment.