China’s robotics industry is rapidly growing, but faces major challenges in advancing its products.
The sector’s revenue grew 29.5% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2025, official data showed. The country has produced 595,000 industrial and 13.5 million service robots this year, more in both cases than last year’s totals. But most industrial robots remain relatively dumb, single-use tools. Generative AI leapt ahead by training on vast amounts of data gleaned from the internet, but real-world data necessary to create “embodied intelligence” that can power robots is harder to generate, meaning robots lack the sophisticated understanding of physics required for meaningful autonomy.
“The industry is still at the starting line of a marathon,” one roboticist told Caixin.