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Unitree Robotics is on its way to becoming the first manufacturer of humanoid robots listed on a mainland Chinese stock exchange. After the subscription for its initial public offering opened in Shanghai, retail investors ordered the shares more than 8,000 times over.

It was a level of demand no other hardware company on earth has ever experienced.

The company expects to raise about 6.1 billion yuan (roughly US$904 million), far more than it had originally planned, because strong demand pushed up the issue price. Early backers expect the market value to multiply once trading begins.

This listing also crowns the rise of founder Wang Xingxing, an engineer whom investors once refused to take seriously, because he has the stubborn habit of searching for his own technological solutions rather than following anybody else's lead.

The rush for Unitree shares, and the worldwide media attention that comes with it, show how strongly investors now believe in physical AI, the marriage of artificial intelligence with machines that walk, grip and work. Money is flowing into Chinese robotics on a scale that was unthinkable three years ago.

The bet behind the frenzy is that humanoid robots will soon stop dancing at trade fairs and start being productive on factory floors. How close that moment really is, and how an outsider built the company at the center of it all, is the subject of this week's Must Read:

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Ten kilometers off the coast near Shanghai, Chinese engineers are testing the world's first underwater data center powered by offshore wind. The rising demand for AI compute and data centers has increased power consumption in the grid of Shanghai’s Lingang Special Area by nearly 30 percent in the first five months of 2026, which in turn is driving this search for innovative ways to reduce data center cooling costs.

Beneath the waves, a submerged cylindrical cabin houses a high-density computing hub, next to more than 50 offshore wind turbines that supply its power. The facility is cooled naturally by the seawater.

The underwater data center is a testing ground for a strategy Beijing calls “computing-power synergy,” or suandian xietong. China’s industrial policy thereby ties the build-out of AI capacity to the build-out of renewable energy.
For details and more analysis, please click here to read the full, free version of this week’s Highlights:

On August 12, SAIC-GM’s Cadillac announced its all-new XT5 PHEV as the first production model to carry Momenta’s mass-produced R7 world model. Momenta is a Suzhou-based Chinese developer of driver-assistance systems that counts Mercedes-Benz among its investors.

According to Cadillac, conventional driver-assistance systems focus primarily on identifying the road and the obstacles immediately ahead. The R7 World Model “can not only ‘see the world’ but also ‘understand the world,’” says the company’s announcement.

Huawei and Tesla currently dominate the market for luxury SUVs in China with powerful driver-assistance systems. The XT5 becomes the first real-world test of whether world models drive better than the systems now on the road.

The Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon has adapted its processors to run inference for five major domestic large language models, chairman and general manager Chen Tianshi said at the company’s half-year earnings briefing on August 12. The five are GLM by Zhipu AI, DeepSeek by DeepSeek, Qwen by Alibaba, Kimi by Moonshot and MiniMax by MiniMax.

Washington bans the export of advanced AI chips to China, and American AI companies such as Anthropic have started to bar Chinese developers from using their models. China’s response is “local substitution,” the effort to make itself less dependent on American AI hardware and software. When Chinese AI models are better integrated with domestic silicon, that substitution gets a direct push.

Shanghai-based AgiBot has surpassed its domestic rival Unitree Robotics to become the world’s largest vendor of humanoid robots in the first half of 2026. AgiBot shipped roughly 8,400 humanoid robots between January and June and captured 44 percent of the global market. Hangzhou-based Unitree, which had led the field, fell to second place with about 5,900 units and a share of 31 percent.

Both companies are currently preparing for an IPO. The frenzy around Unitree’s listing, and how founder Wang Xingxing built the company, is the subject of this week’s Must Read.

The gap between the two rivals is small, and both sales figures are still relatively low. The growth curves, however, and the huge interest in these two upcoming IPOs, show how fast the robotics industry is developing. Industrial and commercial applications now take up more than 70 percent of shipments, up from about 50 percent a year earlier.

The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou is using AI to control the temperature of medicines delivered by drones. This system, called “AI Temperature Control + Drone Medication Delivery,” is the first application of a joint laboratory the hospital founded with Huawei.

The trial service, a first in China, currently uses 14 public drone takeoff and landing sites in Hangzhou, plus a number of temperature-controlled “micro-warehouses.” Within Hangzhou’s main urban area, no more than 30 minutes pass between a patient’s online prescription request and the drone’s landing.

Micro-warehouses and AI-powered drones could fundamentally reshape how drugs are distributed in China’s tiered healthcare system. Main hospitals would no longer need to stock every category of medicine at every primary-care location.

For details and more analysis, please click here to read the full, free version of this week’s Highlights:

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Data centers and AI computing infrastructure in China are expected to consume 800 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity by 2030, around 6 percent of the country’s total, according to the National Energy Administration. The agency expects annual growth of more than 100 billion kWh over the 15th Five-Year Plan period.

Source: Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily)

Memory chip maker CXMT closed with a market capitalization of 3.54 trillion yuan (US$524 billion) on August 13, overtaking Tencent as China’s most valuable listed company only weeks after its Shanghai debut in July.

Source: 21 Shiji Jingji Baodao (21st Century Business Herald)

Global shipments of humanoid robots rose 272 percent year over year to around 19,100 units in the first half of 2026, according to the research firm Smart Analytics Global. AgiBot overtook Unitree as the world’s largest vendor.

Source: Smart Analytics Global (SAG)

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There were a lot of Chinese girls crying for days after losing their AI boyfriends recently.

On July 15, ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba’s Qwen switched off their user-created AI “agents,” the customizable characters that many Chinese users had turned into virtual partners and confidants.

The platforms had to act because on the same day the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services took effect.

For makers of humanoid robots, the message is that companionship products will be judged by the same standards as chatbots.

At its meeting on July 30, 2026, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party’s Central Committee called for the “in-depth implementation” of the government's AI Plus initiative. At its April 28 meeting, the Politburo had only spoken of “comprehensive implementation.”

The change involves only two Chinese characters, but it signals that AI has left the phase of pilot projects and formally entered a phase of broad deployment.

The country is marshaling the power of its US$28 trillion stock and bond markets to finance its AI ambitions. The most spectacular case so far was the Shanghai debut of the memory chip maker CXMT in July.

Access to capital has long been one of America’s biggest advantages in technology, and Beijing is trying to close that gap by opening the door to the US$26 trillion held by Chinese households, the world’s largest pool of savings.

The Beijing Municipal Commission of Development and Reform has issued Measures on Accelerating AI Agent-Led Development, published on the city government’s website on July 23, 2026.

While still best known as a capital populated by powerful bureaucrats, Beijing is now embarking on an ambitious plan to reinvent itself as one of the leading hotspots of the new artificial intelligence economy in the country, competing with other cities like Hangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, is known for his dislike of China. Warning about all kinds of risks emanating from the country is part of his strategic communications, and the company has barred Chinese developers from using its tool. Now China is striking back.

China’s National Vulnerability Database (NVDB) warned on July 8, 2026, of a security backdoor vulnerability in Claude Code, the AI coding tool developed by Anthropic.

For CIOs on both sides of the Pacific, the choice of AI coding tools in China operations has become a compliance question.

For more details on all of these topics and analysis, please click here for the full, free version of the China AI2X Briefing:

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China's president and Meta's CEO make strange bedfellows. This summer, they have one idea in common.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Xi urged all countries to embrace open-source and to share the benefits of AI. A few weeks later, Zuckerberg published an essay warning against concentrated control over the technology.

A closer look reveals that neither of the two acts out of altruism. Chinese developers like DeepSeek or Moonshot give their models away for free, but are rapidly gaining global market share. Meta, which couldn't beat the competition on benchmarks, would probably benefit if the closed labs' advantage were eliminated.

The Chinese government uses the pitch to position itself as a responsible AI superpower, helping to distribute models for the benefit of humankind and especially the Global South. It has realized that AI diffusion is the new soft power. Zuckerberg advocates more openness, but wants China excluded.

No matter whom you bet on, open-source technology has turned into a battleground between China and the West. Whoever sets its technical and legal standards will hold the upper hand for decades.

A 2,500-year-old sentence from the philosopher Laozi explains China's AI strategy.

Why China wants AI to flow like water, while the U.S. holds on to its “oil mindset” of extracting and pricing AI like a scarce resource, and why Washington is starting to change its mind, is the subject of this week's Deep Dive: