Unitree Robotics said it is intensifying work on large-scale manufacturing, AI models and computing infrastructure, with founder Wang Xingxing predicting an industry breakthrough in robots’ ability to perform real-world tasks within one to three years. Wang made the remarks at a partner ecosystem summit in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province on Thursday.
Unitree’s development priorities
Unitree outlined three development priorities: strengthening large-scale manufacturing; developing AI models tailored to Unitree’s hardware, both in-house and with partners; and building large-scale computing clusters. Wang said, “Almost everyone in the world still underestimates AI, myself included.”
The company, billed as China’s first listed embodied AI company, also reported strong recent market movement. On Friday Unitree extended a rally, rising as much as 20 percent to 624 yuan ($93) per share. The stock had previously fallen from a debut peak of 1,100 yuan to 404 yuan, and has rebounded by about 48 percent since last Friday.
Wang said he sees potential demand eventually reaching tens or even hundreds of millions of robots, and warned that data, computing power, chip production capacity, energy and minerals will be key resources shaping future competition.
Since the G1 humanoid model’s launch in May 2024, Unitree has produced about 10,000 to 20,000 G1 humanoid robots, Wang said. He expects commercial services to adopt robots faster than households or industrial users.
Wang signalled growing confidence in what he called “physical AI,” intelligence that allows machines to understand their surroundings and act in the real world. He pointed to internal tests in which a general-purpose AI model controlled a robot painting a picture: the machine changed colors and cleaned its brush without the team writing programs specifically for those actions. Wang said such results suggest AI models can already handle some aspects of task planning and that further advances could help the robotics industry achieve a breakthrough within one to three years.
Wang offered a benchmark for a “ChatGPT moment” in embodied intelligence: a robot that can follow spoken or written instructions to complete roughly 80 percent of tasks in 80 percent of unfamiliar environments.
To accelerate progress, Unitree is developing a system that would let AI participate in improving robot capabilities. At the conference it launched a program aiming to incubate more than 200 partner companies over five years and announced an annual physical AI competition open to teams and individuals worldwide, offering tens of millions of yuan in prizes across areas including dexterous manipulation, production and care services.
Wang said developers in China and overseas were already building algorithms and open-source frameworks on Unitree’s hardware, allowing others to improve on their work.
Broader industry figures cited at the event include data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that China produced more than 40,000 humanoid robots in the first half of 2026, with full-year output expected to exceed 100,000. Wang Tianmiao, a robotics professor at Beihang University, said: “China’s robotics industry has risen rapidly thanks to a combination of market demand, talent, supply chains and data.” He pointed to China’s supply networks for motors, sensors and manufacturing equipment, alongside engineers skilled in integrating software and hardware, as important foundations for growth, but added that widespread household adoption would take longer because robots must meet demanding requirements for safety, cost, maintenance and the ability to perform varied tasks.
