Around 16,000 humanoid robots were installed globally in 2025, according to a report from Counterpoint Research (via SCMP), and of that total figure, almost 13,000 were deployed in China. Around 5,200 of them were shipped by the Shanghai-based Agibot Innovation, with a further 4,200 shipped from Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics. In comparison, the top-performing Western company for humanoid robotics shipments was Tesla, but it secured less than five percent of the overall market and came in fifth in terms of overall sales.
This backs up similar data reports from Omdia, which found Chinese humanoid robotics companies took all the top spots in terms of sales for 2025. It was a bumper year for the technology, with sales increasing almost 500 percent year on year. Omdia predicts that by 2035, the market will grow to around 2.6 million units a year, while CounterPoint Research suggests that it will jump another 500 percent in 2026 alone, which would see close to 100,000 humanoid robots deployed if realized.
(Image credit: Tesla)
Without a major leap in production, sales, and deployment from Western companies, it seems only likely that the vast majority of those humanoid robots will come from Chinese companies.
This is extremely important, as the industry is currently finding its footing, deciding upon standards and norms. If Chinese firms set those, it could cement their dominance for some time to come.
“The next two years will see more humanoid enterprises commercialising the mass-production versions of robots, and their performance will largely determine the development pace of the whole industry,” Counterpoint said in its report, and this is something that Nvidia is also clearly thinking about, too.
If China can leverage its enormous manufacturing capabilities to advance humanoid robotics and deploy them at scale rapidly, it risks winning the AI race without needing to be the best or the smartest. It just needs to be the one that can get the software into the hardware and get it where it needs to be: In factories and homes.
World models are the next frontier
Although the top AI companies are still competing to develop the next best large language model for their chatbots, image generators, and smart assistants, for robotics, the frontier developments are “World Models.” These are neural network AIs designed for the physical world, trained on video and image data rather than simply raw text. This is evident in Nvidia's full-stack physical AI platform, which uses its Cosmos AI platform to train data for self-driving cars, as explained at CES 2026.
Data annotation and the training itself are incredibly intensive, costly, and lengthy processes, so it’s no surprise to learn that Nvidia is keen to be a part of it. Its Cosmos platform provides developers with foundational models to build upon, and it offers bespoke versions of its Blackwell-powered server designs specifically tailored for robotic development workloads.
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