China can build humanoids at scale. The hard part is finding enough
buyers
[June 06, 2026] By
CHAN HO-HIM
HONG KONG (AP) — Chinese-made humanoid robots are making waves with
their ability to do backflips, direct traffic, and even make coffee as
the companies developing them seek ways to expand and dominate the
market.
Robot makers in China say they have thousands of orders from both the
government and private businesses for humanoids that can do such things
as sort parcels at postal centers, as the country finds ways to cope
with an aging population and rising labor costs. However, some experts
believe demand for humanoids lags the capacity to build them.
China and the United States dominate research for what Morgan Stanley
estimates is a $5 trillion humanoid robots market.
By some measures, the U.S. holds an upper hand in developing the
artificial intelligence for such robots' high-level computing power, or
“brains.” But as the world's factory floor, China leads in mass
production capacity, supplies of hardware and harvesting of data for
training robots.
Robot makers say real-life demand is growing
The Shanghai-based startup Matrix Robotics makes humanoid robots that
employ AI. Its flagship humanoid robot, the “MATRIX-3,” stands nearly
5.6 feet (1.7 meters) tall and is equipped with hands able to make
finely controlled movements. They are priced at around $99,000 per unit.
Customers for the roughly 1,000 orders it has received include coffee
chains and hotels, its founder and CEO Allan Zhang, who formerly worked
for Tesla, said at a recent robotics expo in Macao.
So far, Matrix has made only a few hundred of the robots, though it said
it will be capable of delivering 5,000 units within this year, depending
on the number of orders.
EngineAI, a startup based in southern China’s Shenzhen, says its
full-sized humanoid robots could be used as security guards and museum
guides. They also perform, with dancing and boxing.
A basic edition of its humanoid costs 180,000 yuan ($26,600). “The next
step will be to move into more real-life scenarios,” said Issac Li,
EngineAI's head of brand and marketing.
Demand for robots may lag behind
Most humanoid robots are still performative rather than functional,
falling short of working in messy, unpredictable environments, said Samm
Sacks, a senior fellow at the New America think tank focused on Chinese
technology.
“The use cases of these robots are still so limited,” said Chibo Tang of
the venture capital firm Gobi Partners, which invests in technology
startups including robotics companies. “Without the demand and without
that scale from the market, these companies are not able to really go
into mass production.”
China had more than 140 humanoid robot manufacturers and more than 330
models in 2025, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information
Technology. Last year, the Chinese government even publicly warned about
the risk of a bubble in the industry given the lagging state of
commercialization and applications.
Corporate and academic labs are buying humanoid robots for research. And
in China, many of the more than 2 billion yuan ($295 million) worth of
orders in 2025 came from state-owned enterprises for use in places such
as power plants, data centers or for entertainment, Morgan Stanley said.
“The economics are tough: humanoid robots remain expensive to produce,
fragile in operation, and dependent on highly structured environments to
function,” Sacks explained. There's “a long way to go to get to a level
of functionality where people will actually feel comfortable having them
in their homes providing care for elderly or children,” she said.
Still, compared to other countries, China is keen on humanoids
The more viable commercial path will more likely be through industrial
and logistics settings, Sacks said. But many factories in China and
elsewhere already are equipped with non-humanoid robotic arms that
perform repetitive single functions and may not need many humanoid
robots.
In Japan and in the U.S., humanoid robot startups are also struggling to
find buyers in industrial and other work settings.
Yet over the past year, real-world deployment of humanoid robots in
China has accelerated.
Chinese people are relatively “used to this rapid change in terms of
technology,” said Ye Tian, an ex-Apple engineer and founder and CEO of
the Chinese startup RoboScience, which focuses on developing the systems
behind AI-powered robots.
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Workers assemble robot at the LY iTech Beijing Super Factory for
Embodied Artificial Intelligence during a media tour in the Beijing
E-Town on the outskirts of Beijing on May 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Andy
Wong)
As the technology matures, humanoids could perform heavy-lifting and
mundane tasks in warehouses, factories and ports, said Lian Jye Su, with
the technology research group Omdia.
Humanoid robots also can fill in gaps where work is dangerous or
repetitive, Matrix's Zhang said. There's also a “very large household
market” for handling chores in hundreds of millions of homes in China,
he believes.
In Beijing, freelance social media content creator Yang Ning recently
tried out a cleaning service with a helper robot with mechanical arms
and hands. It can do simple tasks like organizing shoes, folding clothes
and changing garbage bags, but it's accompanied by a human cleaner.
Watching the robot sort shoes at her doorway was “amazing,” she said.
Still, she thought the helper robot was not that efficient and was “a
bit too big and difficult to move around in a small house.”
China leads the global humanoid robots market
Last year, Chinese humanoid robots accounted for around 85% globally,
according to a recent research report by Barclays.
Startups in China have the advantage of massive state support, in line
with the ruling Communist Party’s 2026-2030 five-year plan targeting the
frontiers of technology, including advancements of humanoid robots.
Of the more than 13,000 humanoid robots shipped in 2025, AGIBOT and
Unitree, two of China’s leading robotics companies, each shipped over
5,000, while U.S. rivals like Figure AI and Tesla each shipped a few
hundred or less, according to Omdia.
Morgan Stanley expects China’s humanoid sales to more than double this
year to around 28,000 units. Omdia forecasts that annual shipments of
advanced robots could surpass 1 million units by the early 2030s.
Some robot makers say they are already profitable. Unitree said it made
1.7 billion yuan (around $250 million) in revenue last year, with a
profit of over 278 million yuan ($41 million).
Robot makers argue that as production of humanoid robots increases,
costs will drop. Using more locally made parts also helped make Chinese
robots 20% or more cheaper than foreign models on average, Morgan
Stanley said. It estimates the average price could fall to about $21,000
by 2050, from $46,000 last year.
Some humanoid robots in China were priced at below $6,000.
Even so, cost remains an obstacle
A report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies said while China’s
humanoids are already cheaper than those made elsewhere, they are still
“far too expensive for widespread deployment.”
Another challenge for manufacturers is to accumulate enough good data to
train more robots.
Wang Xiaogang, co-founder of the Chinese AI software company SenseTime
and chairman of ACE Robotics, said his company is collecting a lot of
human-centric data from factories, retailing and offices settings that
could guide advanced robots to perform complicated functions.
For humanoid robots to learn more than single tasks, data from a wide
variety of scenarios in public and private settings with a reasonable
level of difficulty is needed, said Eric Guo, founder and CEO of
Shenzhen-based AI² Robotics. But that could take years to massively
scale up.
“The mass production capability in (the) robotic area is still at the
very early stage,” Guo said.
___
Associated Press video journalists Olivia Zhang and Wu Jia in Beijing
contributed to this report.
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