Oren Etzioni, the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, published a pointed analysis on July 5 arguing that China has already won the first round of the physical AI race. The most striking data point comes from Barclays: China accounted for an estimated 85 percent of global humanoid robot installations in the preceding year. Beijing now hosts more than 140 domestic robotics companies with over 330 commercially available models.
The contrast with the United States is structural, not just technological. In China, robotics firms are rewarded for units shipped and contracts signed. UBTech launched its UWORLD U1 companion robot on June 30 and recorded over 13,000 pre-orders on day one. It also secured a $37 million contract to deploy Walker S2 humanoids at a border crossing with Vietnam. In the US, by comparison, Tesla's Optimus programme is grappling with roughly 10,000 unique parts per unit, and Musk has conceded that early production "will be extremely slow at first". Global investment in humanoid robots reached $6.1 billion in 2025, four times the 2024 figure, but the bulk of deployed hardware is coming out of Chinese factories.