We’re entering the era of humanoid robot mega factories.
UBTECH says its new mega factory in Liuzhou, developed in collaboration with the German industrial automation giant Siemens, just officially began operations. It covers about 14,000 square meters (151,000 square ft), about the size of 2.5 American football fields.
According to UBTECH, it scales to 10,000 units per year. That’s on top of its other main production base in Shenzhen and network of smaller specialized facilities across the mainland. The combined annual capacity, as reported by the robotics firm, is close to 20,000 units. At full speed, one robot would leave the production line at the company’s so-called super smart factory every 10 minutes.
From Toy Robots to Industrial Humanoids
UBTECH has been building toward this since Zhou Jian founded the company in Shenzhen back in 2012. It first gained attention with its compact Alpha humanoids developed to compete with Nao from the now defunct French company Aldebaran Robotics. UBTECH’s Alpha bots offered a similar form factor and programmability at a fraction of the cost, typically under $1,000.
The company then expanded its global footprint through STEM with DIY kits and coding platforms. It also took a few swings at the US consumer market with collaborations with Disney on $300 robots tied to the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017 and Avengers Infinity War in 2019. It also launched Lynx, an Alexa-powered humanoid priced around $800. Then came service robots. It priced its wheeled Cruzr under $8,000 to undercut Softbank’s Pepper.
By the late 2010s, UBTECH was China’s most visible humanoid robot maker. It unveiled its first bipedal robot named Walker at CES 2018. A more advanced iteration, the Walker X, followed in 2021 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai.
UBTECH initially targeted consumers with its Walker humanoids, but the technology wasn’t mature enough. So, it pivoted into industrial automation, which has fueled its growth in recent years. UBTECH became the first Chinese humanoid robot company to go public in December 2023 when it entered the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) at a nearly $5 billion valuation. The listing made Zhao, who owned 24 percent of the company’s shares, China’s first billionaire from the humanoid robotics sector.
The IPO came as Beijing declared humanoids a national priority, setting a goal to mass produce them by 2025 and to lead the market by 2027.
UBTECH is currently still valued at around $5 billion. Its competitor Hangzhou-based Unitree has a valuation about 10x higher after entering the tech-heavy Shanghai STAR Market and gets more attention. But UBTECH has remained one of the leading Chinese firms helping Beijing push toward its goal of humanoid domination. In 2025, it reported shipping more than a thousand of its industrial walker humanoids and has announced deployments with giants like Foxconn, BYD, Airbus, and Texas Instruments.
For mainstream audiences, however, UBTECH has gotten the most attention from its consumer sub-brand UWorld’s U1 line of ultra-bionic humanoid companions. UBTECH reported getting more than 13,000 preorders for the robots that required a fully refundable $400 deposit, but the official number of buyers remains unclear since pricing wasn’t revealed until launch day.
UBTECH’s 2026 Growth
In its latest 2026 semiannual report, UBTECH said its humanoid business is scaling quickly. It reported reaching $189 million in revenue, up 104 percent YoY during the first half of 2026. Still, the company reported a net loss of about $50 million, though that was a 23 percent improvement from last year. It wants to consistently break even or profit quarter to quarter by the end of 2027.
The company says its new Liuzhou plant is meant to support the next stage of large-scale production. The city, which is about an 8-hour drive from UBTECH’s Shenzhen headquarters, is in the Guanxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of Southern China. It’s a major manufacturing hub with a strong automotive and heavy industry base that’s also well suited for humanoid robot production.
UBTECH’s new plant was supposed to start mass-producing humanoids in July, but flooding in Guanxi caused substantial work stoppages. The company said the slowdown also delayed first shipments of its lifelike U1 robots that were initially planned for mid-September.
UBTECH dramatically lowered its near-term shipment expectations. In June, Zhou pledged to fulfill more than 10,000 orders by the year’s end. Management now says its target is 1,500 to 2,000 by the end of 2026. Another bottleneck is that making the faces realistic requires labor-intensive processes like eyelash implantation. The company says it’s figuring out ways to standardize automation to replace some of those manual processes and to lower costs.
The robots are priced from around $17,600 for a U1 Lite bust to 25,000 for a stationary U1 Pro to nearly $150,000 for an adult-scale U1 Ultra humanoid. UBTECH says the order mix is about 40 percent Lite, 30 percent Pro, and 30 percent Ultra. Pro is getting priority shipping.
Though UBTECH leaned heavily into innuendo during its Westworld-like launch event over the summer, the products are fairly conventional service robots that are not equipped to replace a romantic partner. The company sees two very different markets for the product line. The lower-end models are intended as emotional companions and personal assistance, while Ultra is targeted at businesses as a cyber employee for jobs like reception, live streaming, and customer service.
UBTECH plans to open a flagship store to sell the robots in Shanghai by the end of the year. They’re plotting an expansion into Japan, South Korea, Europe, and the US through distributors and customized IP partnerships. The immobile lower-end models fall outside the FCC’s newest foreign robot restrictions. UBTECH plans to get recurring revenue from the bionic robots. Rather than just selling the hardware, it’s proposing a consumer model that includes software, content, and services.
Industrial humanoids remain UBTECH’s core business at the moment. Its flagship Walker S2 robot, known for its ability to swap out its own batteries, accounted for most of its humanoid revenue. It’s reportedly priced between 80 and $145,000. It’s the main humanoid being manufactured at UBTECH’s new factory along with the newer Walker C1 that’s built for public-facing roles.
Standing 176 cm (5 feet 9 inches), the Walker S2 weighs about 70 kg (154 lbs) and has a reported 52 degrees of freedom (DoF) throughout its body. It perceives its surroundings using fisheye cameras, while force sensors in its arms and joints tell it how much pressure it’s applying when lifting or handling items. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) helps it understand balance, direction, and body movement.
The Walker S2 sends the combined info to its onboard AI that runs on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin computer paired with an Intel x86 processor. The robots are used primarily for simple jobs like material handling, while more difficult tasks like cable handling and screwdriver are under development. Robots deployed in factories are also being used to generate training data. UBTECH says it’s accumulated about 11 million pieces of robot data, over 80 percent of which is from industrial environments. It plans to use data from every deployed robot to improve its AI models.
UBTECH x Siemens Mega Factory
The new factory is part of UBTECH’s physical AI strategy. It’s working with Siemens to connect design, engineering, simulation, testing, and manufacturing into one system. Siemens’ software creates digital twins of manufacturing processes so engineers can test changes virtually before making them on the factory floor. Management says it cut design cycles 35 percent, validation time 50 percent, and boosted coding efficiency 38 percent.
Footage shared by UBTECH and broadcast on Chinese state media shows robots doing factory work normally handled by people or traditional automation. Its wheeled Cruzr Y1 robots appear to be doing the heavy lifting. UBTECH hasn’t publicized pricing, but third-party estimates are in the $50,000 range.
Beijing’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) expects more than 100,000 human-like robots to come off production lines by year’s end. About 10,000 are targeted for real commercial jobs, while the rest are collecting data, being used as high-end RC toys, or waiting for real work.
100,000 Chinese Humanoids
UBTECH will likely close 2026 as China’s third largest humanoid maker by volume behind Shanghai-based Agibot, which says it shipped 15,000 humanoids in the first half of the year; and Unitree, whose volume is estimated in the 6-7,000-unit range. UBTECH reported delivering 921 but they were mostly more expensive industrial robots like the Walker S2.
Other Chinese players are scaling quickly, too. Shenzhen’s Leju Robot opened a plant earlier this year with a capacity above 10,000 units that’s reportedly capable of producing one humanoid every half hour. The 10-year-old robotics firm is pursuing an IPO alongside several other Shenzhen startups.
Among them is the much younger EngineAI which is now manufacturing its world famous T800 humanoids from plants in Shenzhen and Zhengzhou. In Guangzhou, the EV maker XPeng just opened its new humanoid factory where its first IRON robot just walked off the production line. The Tesla rival opened the factory after raising $900 million for its robotics division.
And the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, also known as X-Humanoid, which is backed by UBTECH, is pushing its Tiangong robots that went viral during the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing toward commercial applications. The government-backed innovation hub is led by UBTECH CTO Xiong Youjun, who says a public listing will be necessary to fund its vision.
Meanwhile in the US, humanoid companies are pulling out all the stops heading into 2027.
Figure AI’s Helix 2.5 Testing
Silicon Valley-based Figure AI just released 4 hours of footage showing its robots doing household chores across 30 rented Bay Area homes. According to the robotics firm, its flagship figure three robots completed 56 percent of the tasks zero shot, which means they required no retraining.
The $39 billion startup boasted about the results as it announced its new Helix 2.5 AI model. Figure is aggressively scaling real-world training data that feeds the AI brain powering its humanoids.
Its recently launched Index program pays people worldwide to record themselves doing everyday tasks at homes and at work. In just a few months, Figure says Index has collected more than 16 million videos from 108 countries with 44,000 weekly contributors. It’s now processing more than 35 minutes of raw footage every second.
The company is also ramping up its compute to handle the massive amount of data. It signed a deal with the British AI infrastructure giant Nscale to access up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin AI chips, committing to spend $3.5 billion and potentially up to $6 billion.
1X Targets 50,000 NEOs in 2027
One of Figure’s biggest competitors, 1X Technologies, is also planning a massive scale up in 2027.
Founder and CEO Bernt Bornich just told Ti Morse on his Relentless podcast that 1X is targeting a production volume of 50,000 NEO humanoids. That would be more than the expected output of Agibot, Unitree, and probably UBTECH for 2026 combined. It’s also more than the number of humanoids Unitree has shipped ever.
“There will be a couple of enterprise applications where we have very large customers so we can deploy a lot of robots into specific verticals,” Bornich said. “And there’s going to be some t the home and it’s going be a lot to the platform. It’s going to be a good mix of all of them.”
The startup, founded in Norway in 2014 and now headquartered in Palo Alto, opened a factory in Hayward, Calif., earlier this year with a reported annual capacity exceeding 10,000 units. A second factory is planned for Santa Clara with a targeted capacity of 100,000 units.
1X has not commented on reports that the Japanese tech giant Softbank plans to buy a majority stake of the startup. If that deal does happen, Foxconn could end up scaling NEO like it did Pepper in the 2010s. However, the stars would need to align perfectly for 1X to reach its goal of 50,000 units in 20267, especially when it likely won’t meet its 2026 goal of 10,000 robots.
Agility’s Digit 5 Ramp Up
One of the pioneers in the humanoid race, Agility, is planning to scale its next generation Digit from its 10,000-unit RoboFab plant in Salem, OR.
Digit 5 stands 180 cm (5 feet 11 inches) and weighs 129 kg (284 lbs). That’s about twice as heavy as Digit 4, and its signature bird legs are gone. Its battery lasts 90 minutes, but Agility says it can recharge itself autonomously in 9 minutes and work up to 20 hours per day.
Agility is playing up the robot safety features more than anything. The company says Digit 5 has specialized sensors that detect nearby people and slow down, stop, or shut off. Agility is working toward getting Digit 5 certified as the first humanoid safe enough to work outside caged areas in factories and warehouses alongside people.
The decade-old startup is pursuing a public listing via a SPAC merger in hopes of coming out ahead of its competition. Read all about the divisive plans here.