Humanoid robotics company Figure has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Nscale, a UK-based AI cloud infrastructure provider, to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. The initial compute commitment is valued at $3.5 billion, with both parties intending to scale the deal to over $6 billion. First deployment is targeted for the second half of 2027 at Nscale’s data center in Barstow, Texas. As part of the agreement, Nscale will also make a strategic equity investment in Figure and become its preferred compute provider. The two companies will explore using humanoid robots to expand Nscale’s own supply chain operations. Nscale, which counts NVIDIA as an investor following its participation in the firm’s Pre-Series C SAFE...
Astribot, a Chinese robotics startup, has unveiled SmoothRL, an online reinforcement learning framework designed to train policies during asynchronous execution – a growing reality for embodied AI deployments where inference and action run at different frequencies. The work, led by the company’s foundation model team, addresses a fundamental mismatch: when a robot receives new action chunks before previous ones finish, conventional RL that updates on entire chunks ends up crediting or blaming actions that were never actually executed. The framework partitions each action chunk into three regions – committed (already fixed), execution (actually performed), and discarded (overwritten by later inference) – and backpropagates gradients only through the execution region. This ensures that optimisation mirrors the robot’s real experience. SmoothRL also...
Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs has released Atlas, a next-generation world model billed as the first multimodal system capable of pixel-level camera-controllable image and video generation paired with native 3D scene reconstruction. Trained from scratch on text, image, video and 3D data, the so-called “omni model” unifies four distinct modalities within a single unified architecture. Its flagship innovation, termed “spatial context”, grounds each input image in a precise 3D coordinate space with explicit camera pose parameters. By treating geometric camera controls as native inputs, Atlas eliminates reliance on textual prompts to describe camera motion, letting users specify exact viewing angles and trajectories to generate up to 1440p-resolution videos with a maximum one-minute duration. World Labs frames the upgrade as letting...
A mysterious Chinese artificial intelligence team has released a series of uncut, one-take videos showing humanoid robots performing household tasks with fluid, human-like coordination, reigniting online speculation that embodied intelligence might be nearing a “ChatGPT moment.” The clips, which went viral last week, depict robots adapting to external physical disturbances while carrying a water glass, tidying a living room in a single long-horizon sequence, collaborating to smooth a bedsheet, and carrying multiple items at once – all without visible teleoperation, according to the developers. The underlying model, internally codenamed MVP – short for “Make Veritable People” – is designed to endow machines with physical reasoning and autonomous decision-making rather than probabilistic imitation, the team said in response to inquiries. In...
PsiBot has officially closed a new round of financing worth more than $100 million, according to an August 27 update. The round brings together industrial leaders and institutional investors including Tuopu Group, Ruicheng Fund under Chery Holdings, Lens Technology, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Wuhu Investment Holding Group and Fosun Chuangfu. Existing shareholder Zhuhai Science and Technology Industry Group made a further over‑subscribed follow‑on investment. Following previous backing from state‑affiliated investors, this financing round draws capital from multiple leading real‑economy enterprises. It marks dual authoritative recognition of PsiBot’s technical roadmap and commercial value from both state‑owned capital and industrial players. The firm has built a multi‑dimensional development framework featuring national policy guidance, real‑world industrial deployment and long‑term capital support. As China’s first...
AI robotics firm Sharpa has completed financing totaling over 4.5 billion RMB, backed by a lineup of top industrial and financial investors. The investor consortium includes industrial giants Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com and Transsion Holdings, as well as leading investment institutions such as Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, Meituan Longzhu Capital and Photosynthesis Venture Capital. The raised funds will be dedicated to core technology R&D, global talent recruitment and cultivation, and advancing the real-world deployment of general-purpose robots from technical verification to large-scale commercial application. Marking a key milestone for real-scene robotic implementation, the world’s first fully autonomous, renovation-free, year-round robotic restaurant — jointly built by Sharpa and DQ — officially launched on August 29 at DQ’s Wujiang Road store...
DexTeleop, an embodied-AI infrastructure provider, has closed a nine-figure RMB (tens of millions USD) Pre-A round led by Zhuzhou Industrial Investment, Feitu Capital, Future Margin Ventures, and Xineng Ventures. Proceeds will scale production of its robot hardware, upgrade real-world data collection pipelines, and advance its cloud operation platform. Maple Pledge continues as exclusive PE advisor. This marks DexTeleop’s third funding round this year, following prior backers including InnoFund, CMC Capital, Galaxy Innovation, Futian Capital, Leaguer, and Tianying Capital—total financing now exceeds nine figures RMB. As embodied AI moves from demos to commercial deep water in 2026, investor focus shifts from pure growth to the viability of “real-scenario data driving model evolution.” Founded in early 2025, DexTeleop builds full-stack infrastructure—robot bodies, data acquisition,...
The hype surrounding humanoid robots is hardly new, fueled largely by Tesla’s Optimus and viral demo clips from Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. Beneath the buzz lies tangible technical progress: robot physical performance keeps improving, and LLM‑derived AI enables complex robots to learn diverse real‑world tasks. Driven by these advances, a wave of new entrants — notably Chinese automakers — are betting big on commercial profits from humanoid robots. Xpeng’s robotics division secured over $900 million in fresh funding, hitting a $6.3‑billion post‑money valuation. Backed by IDG Capital, Gaorong Ventures, Tencent and Alibaba, it marks China’s largest‑ever single financing round for embodied AI. Xpeng’s founders He Xiaopeng and Brian Gu also personally invested roughly $100 million in this round to back Iron,...
AGIBOT made its debut at the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games, securing 18 gold, 16 silver and 12 bronze medals. With 46 medals in total, AGIBOT ranked first on both the gold medal table and the overall medal table. The World Humanoid Robot Games is an international competition designed to test humanoid robots across sports, dexterous manipulation and real-world scenario-based tasks. This year’s events ranged from athletics, martial arts and dance to hotel services, library operations, emergency response and industrial applications. AGIBOT’s medal wins spanned dexterous manipulation, scenario-based tasks and motion-control events, including titles in martial arts, dance and obstacle racing. Notably, AGIBOT’s competition lineup, including OmniHand, G2, A3 and X2, consists of robots already in mass production or deployed in...
