At Tesla's Q3 2026 earnings call, Musk gave several Optimus timelines: a demo video of non-preprogrammed movements may be released within one to two months; the AI5 chip, with an order of magnitude more integrated compute than AI4, in April next year; and deliveries to external customers later next year, with the first batch aimed at industrial scenarios.
In his keynote at the 2026 World Physical AI Conference, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said that with the release of GPT-6, physical AI has shown signs of being broken through, and a breakthrough could come within the next 1 to 2 years or 2 to 3 years. He believes the core challenge for embodied intelligence to pass the ChatGPT moment is aligning AI model inputs and outputs with real robots, and judges that commercial service scenarios will be deployed faster than home and industrial ones. According to the on-site introduction, the G1 robot released in May 2024 has cumulatively produced about 10,000 to 20,000 units.
Bloomberg reported on October 22 that DeepSeek's current funding round is set at about 100 billion yuan, with a pre-money valuation of about 500 billion yuan. The company initially planned to raise 50 billion yuan, doubling it to the 100 billion level after two increases. Existing shareholders Tencent and CATL each added about 10 billion yuan to become cornerstone investors, while new participants include Shixi Capital, SMIC Capital, CPE Yuanfeng, Legend Capital and Geely. Combined with the 51 billion yuan first round in late June, the company has raised more than 150 billion yuan in just over 100 days.
Tan Weijia, Full-time Secretary-General of the Shenzhen Robotics Association, was invited to the ROSCon China 2026 Summit Roundtable Forum, "The Next Stage of Embodied Intelligence: Paradigms, Order, and Boundaries," where she spoke with guests including Benmo Robotics scientist Liu Senyi and Yunmu Zhizao COO Yang Jianqiang.
The 2026 Greater Bay Area Science Forum—Supporting the Construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area International Science and Technology Innovation Center Science and Technology Achievement Exhibition and Matchmaking Special Event (Guangzhou) will be held from October 31 to November 2 at the Nansha International Convention and Exhibition Center in Guangzhou. Registration is now open.
The Shenzhen Robotics Association will hold the FAIR plus Malaysia Launch Event on November 25, 2026, at JCorp headquarters in Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia, building a "Johor–Singapore–Shenzhen" technology and AI matchmaking channel. The agenda covers presentations on China's robotics industry, agricultural robotics, digital twins, and industrial intelligence, and connects with scenario owners in the JCorp system, including JPG, KPJ, JCG, JLG, and the Johor Bahru City Council (MBJB), offering Chinese and Singaporean companies a path to conduct pilots, co-build, and deploy in real Johor business environments.
Dianshi Technology, a Siasun Robot subsidiary, completed a capital increase and share expansion, adding 6 state-owned investors with a combined capital increase of about 114 million yuan for a 69.59% stake, at a post-investment valuation of about 164 million yuan; Siasun's indirect shareholding through Xinzhitou fell from 100% to 30.41%, and Dianshi Technology is no longer included in the consolidated financial statements.
Hunan Viewtrix Robot exhibited its dual-machine collaborative welding workstation, humanoid welding robot, residual material intelligent scanning system, intelligent grinding workstation, and Kunwu industrial simulation platform at the 2026 China Ocean Economy Expo. The dual-machine collaborative welding workstation is equipped with SpeedWeld intelligent welding control software and has been adapted to more than 20 mainstream robot brands, including FANUC, KUKA, YASKAWA, and ABB. It supports both with-drawing and without-drawing modes, can reliably recognize highly reflective workpieces such as 0.5mm thin plates, and shortens the changeover cycle for new workpieces by 90%.
The 2026 Physical AI and World Models Conference opened in Nanjing on October 20, hosted by Jiangsu Data Group, Nanjing Big Data Group, and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. At the opening ceremony, the National Data Annotation Pilot Su-Wan City Alliance (Yangtze River Delta Data Annotation Joint Innovation Center) was established, and Jiangsu released an action plan for high-quality datasets for physical AI and world models, nine typical innovation achievements, and 50 typical application scenarios.
According to Korean media outlet The Elec, Tesla and SpaceX are in talks with about 10 Korean semiconductor materials, components, and equipment suppliers for their Terafab chip manufacturing project, and more than half have signed non-disclosure agreements.
Arm is partnering with more than 80 companies to accelerate the development of physical AI. It introduces its new initiatives to define robot system capabilities and drive their evolution. Be sure to watch. https://ai.softbank/action/025/?utm_source=TwitterSBG&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=brand20261022 #SoftBankGroup #SoftBankGroup #AI
In October, Siasun Robot announced through its wholly owned subsidiary Xinzhi Tou that its industrial cleaning robot company Dianshi Technology completed a capital increase and share expansion. Six new investors contributed a total of 114 million yuan for a 69.59% stake, among which the related party Chanfa Group contributed 10 million yuan for a 6.13% stake. Siasun's indirect stake will fall to 30.41%, and the company will no longer be consolidated into its financial statements.
Zhang Zhongqi, Product Director of Pudu Robotics, will give a keynote talk titled "One Brain, Multiple Forms: Into Industrial Sites" at the 2026 Embodied Picking and Loading/Unloading Robotics Industry Forum, held on November 04 at the CeMAT exhibition at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre. The forum is hosted by the Mobile Robot Industry Alliance and the Humanoid Robot Scenario Application Alliance, features two tracks for picking and loading/unloading, and will hold the global premiere of the 2026 Embodied Loading/Unloading Robotics Market Insights and Industry Trends Report.
At the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference, Unitree Technology's Wang Xingxing gave a roughly 30-minute speech, saying that GPT-6 has been fully deployed on Unitree robots with zero training, enabling them to autonomously paint, clean paintbrushes, play Go and chess, and find kitchens and tools on their own. He judged that physical AI being cracked is very likely to happen in the next 1-2 or 2-3 years, and that the industry is moving toward an embodied-intelligence ChatGPT moment, in which robots can complete about 80% of tasks in 80% of unfamiliar scenarios based on voice or text instructions.
Schneider Electric, Nvidia and HPE have formed a strategic collaboration to launch AI agents that can monitor and optimize industrial operations inside factories and process plants. The first batch, Industrial AI Agents at the Edge, focuses on operational technology (OT) monitoring, cybersecurity and energy consumption optimization.
At GTC Berlin, Jensen Huang said PCs need to be reinvented as personal agents and showcased RTX Spark, a four-year collaboration with Microsoft that uses a chip design combining CPU and GPU, offers up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI compute, and can run larger models locally.
Tesla reported Q3 2026 revenue of $28.046 billion and net profit of $787 million, down 43% year over year. On the earnings call, Musk said Optimus has entered production on a line at the Fremont factory and is expected to be delivered to external customers by the end of next year, reaching an output rate of 20,000 units per week by the end of 2027. He also said an "Optimus Academy" will let the robots observe human tasks and practice repeatedly in simulation and reality to form a reinforcement-learning flywheel, and that the AI 5 chip will be integrated into Optimus around April next year.
Microsoft announced that it is adding a group of supervisory agents called Guardian Agents to its security system Project Perception. They are responsible for checking the behavior of other agents; upon detecting anomalies, they investigate the cause and, according to enterprise rules, tighten permissions, require human approval, or isolate and halt the agent.
Tesla's latest earnings report shows Q3 operating profit of $718 million, down 56% year over year, with operating margin falling to 2.6%; after-hours trading fell as much as 4.5%, wiping out over $68 billion in value. Over the same period, overall gross profit rose 9% year over year, and automotive gross margin recovered to 18.5%.
AgiBot and related companies signed agreements for three projects under Lujiazui Group — Qiantan Origin, Qiantan Shang, and Yuqiao Smart Valley — totaling more than 220,000 square meters, with annual rent of about 350 million yuan (excluding property fees), setting a record for a single office leasing transaction in Shanghai.
Schaeffler has reached a technology partnership with German robotics and Physical AI company Wandelbots to jointly advance the application of the open platform Wandelbots NOVA in industrial and humanoid robotics, with the goal of integrating Physical AI into Schaeffler's global production network.
Why it matters: The partnership clarifies a deployment path from platform standardization and virtual validation to rollout across global factories, and can serve as a reference path for Physical AI entering production networks.
Over the past two months, ByteDance has made intensive moves in AI video tools, building a product matrix that includes Jimeng, Xiaoyunque, a comic-drama creation tool, Dramagic, and Jianying Hub, covering scenarios such as film-grade creation, short dramas, comic dramas, marketing, and UGC editing.
QuantumBit reports that embodied data company Maxinsights has delivered over 2 million hours of egocentric data to clients including Google DeepMind, Figure AI, Dyna Robotics, and Genesis AI, with ARR near $100 million for several consecutive months.
Tesla confirmed on its Q3 2026 earnings call that Optimus has rolled off the mass-production line in Fremont; these are the first standard mass-production models, and production started one quarter earlier than planned at the beginning of the year. Musk said the capacity ramp-up will take at least a year, with a final target of 20,000 units per week, corresponding to a production-line hardware design ceiling of one million units per year. The AI capabilities needed for autonomous operation are expected to mature by the end of next year; robots rolling off the line before then will be used internally at Tesla first, with external supply coming later.
Why it matters: The original ties production start, ramp-up period, and external delivery conditions into a single timeline, helping readers understand the gap between prototypes and stable deliveries.
Tesla released its Q3 2026 financial report: 486,500 vehicles delivered, total revenue of $28.05 billion, and operating profit halved year-over-year to $720 million; in the same period, SpaceX revenue grew 161% with net profit of $4.4 billion.
The article analyzes the visible and hidden lines behind the convergence of physical AI and industrial scenarios. Han Chen, president of ABB China, believes that working conditions with small batches, multiple varieties, and high-frequency changeovers are best suited to physical AI, but the existing thresholds of safety, efficiency, and cost in industry leave no room for trial and error. Han Chen says that AI hallucinations have very serious consequences in factory operations.
SpaceX and Tesla have each formed special committees to discuss a merger. Musk confirmed it is a good idea but the terms are undecided, and the merger is not yet a done deal. Based on the October 20 closing prices, the two companies have a combined market value of about $3.5 trillion. If merged through a stock swap, Musk would hold about 37% of the equity and about 56% of the voting power in the combined company. The biggest obstacle is the Tesla shareholder vote: support from more than half of all issued shares is required, while Musk holds only about 20%, and as a conflicted party he must recuse himself from negotiations.
NVIDIA announced several implementations of open models and physical intelligence in European retail: Shopify used NVIDIA Megatron Bridge and NeMo RL to post-train Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, cutting serving costs by 90% and delivering 7x faster responses on internal benchmarks.
The article contrasts two sides of the robotics industry: Unitree Technology's stock price rose nearly 30% over three trading days, with its market value returning above 200 billion yuan, while a group of star robotics companies such as Yinghe Robotics have successively entered bankruptcy liquidation. Yinghe had received investment from ByteDance, GSR Ventures, and others, with a peak valuation exceeding $500 million; Dataa, Shenlan, Zhicheng Dynamics, and others have also fallen into difficulty because orders could not be delivered and they could not sustain themselves financially.
Tesla Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said on the earnings call that capital expenditure will continue to expand in the coming years, covering scaling the Robotaxi fleet, Optimus production capacity, solar manufacturing capacity, procurement of AI compute infrastructure, and construction of a chip factory. He said this strategy will support the company in entering a new growth cycle, and also said the foundation laid by autonomous driving, humanoid robots, and energy storage will bring promising prospects.
At the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said the GPT moment for embodied intelligence means robots can successfully complete about 80% of main tasks in about 80% of unfamiliar scenarios via voice or text commands. He believes large models already have strong capabilities in robot planning and navigation, and that the biggest challenge in passing the GPT moment remains aligning AI model inputs and outputs with real robots. He expects that, at the fastest, by the end of this year or next year, robots may be able to complete tasks such as tidying a room on command.
The three major A-share indices closed the midday session lower, with the Shanghai Composite down 0.89%, the Shenzhen Component down 1.78%, and the ChiNext Index down 2.77%. Robotics concept stocks were active against the trend, with Moons' Electric and Zhaowei Machinery & Electronics hitting the limit up; telecom equipment, shipping, and electronic components sectors led the declines, with Tongwei shares hitting the limit down and Eoptolink falling over 10%.
At the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said that with the release of GPT-6, physical AI is showing signs of breaking through and could achieve a breakthrough in the next 1-2 or 2-3 years. He believes the core challenge for embodied intelligence to pass the ChatGPT moment is aligning AI model inputs and outputs with real robots, and that deployment in commercial services will come faster than in home and industrial settings.
Suzhou Limiaoda Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. announced that its Series B1 and B2 rounds together raised nearly 500 million yuan, and that its Series B3 round of several hundred million yuan has been oversubscribed by multiple institutions. The funds will go toward a manufacturing base for semiconductor and optical module intelligent equipment, an AI4S laboratory, and an embodied intelligence algorithm team.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company's earnings call that the humanoid robot sector will become the world's largest industry, and that the number of humanoid robots on Earth may eventually exceed the human population. He expects that by late next year, issues such as robot AI, electromechanical design, reliability, and service life will hopefully be resolved, and only then can Optimus be delivered to companies other than Tesla.
Unitree Technology issued an announcement on abnormal stock trading fluctuations after its closing price deviation accumulated to over 30% across three consecutive trading days on October 16, 19, and 20. It closed at 526.03 yuan per share on October 20, with a market value of 212.8 billion yuan.
The article notes that all-inclusive daily rental for humanoid robots fell from 10,000 yuan in early 2025 to under 3,000 yuan for a Unitree U2 including technical staff in October this year, while UBTech signed a strategic cooperation agreement with C&D Inc. on October 9 covering channels, supply chain, financing leases, and overseas markets.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced in Paris a new round of strategic investments in four French startups, covering health tech, chemical materials, business planning, and robotics. Genesis AI is the only robotics target, and it is negotiating a new funding round at a valuation of about $3 billion, roughly 20 billion yuan.
Hai Robotics has partnered with Mega to deploy FlashPick rack-climbing robots and 8-meter double-deep racks at its Los Angeles warehouse in the US, completing over a year of full-scenario commercial validation. Within a 600 sq m storage area, 11,016 bin locations are laid out, raising storage capacity by 400% compared with a traditional manual warehouse. The system includes 25 FlashPick robots, 4 inbound buffer rack workstations, and 5 outbound workstations, scheduled by the HaiQ WES and ESS systems.
AgiBot announced that starting October 22, it will release seven full-stack technology achievements over seven consecutive working days, covering datasets, an operation platform, the heavy-duty robot G2 Max, the embodied Agent framework GenieMaster, a simulation platform, a foundation model, and a collective experience learning paradigm.