Humanoid robot production goes exponential, led by China

A new report from analyst firm Omdia reveals that China has a massive head-start when it comes to the manufacture of this year’s hot technological trend.

Scott Bicheno, Editorial Director

January 9, 2026

2 Min Read

source: fourier intelligence

As we

observed yesterday, everyone who’s anyone in the tech world will be banging on about humanoid robots this year. You don’t need to be a fan of science fiction to have been able to extrapolate the current AI mania in the direction of sentient robots and now the race is on to dominate a potentially limitless market.

According to a new “By late 2025, embodied intelligence shifted from prototypes to scaled pilots, driven by Chinese volume production and US AI innovation,” wrote author Lian Jye Su in the report. “True general-purpose robots – autonomously handling diverse, unstructured tasks – remain emerging. Still, the convergence of AI models, dexterous hands – 16 degrees of freedom (DoF) hands – and end-to-end imitation and self-reinforcement learning has made them viable for industrial, service, and eventual household roles, marking the dawn of widespread embodied AI.”

Related: CES 2026 roundup – the tech, the gadgets, and the odd stuff Omdia reckons the global market for general-purpose embodied intelligent robots will more or less double every year for a while and will reach 2.6 million by 2035. That’s a lot of robots. Coupled with the enormous investments in AI it’s easy to see the sophistication of these robots increasing at a similar rate. Welcome to the future.

About the Author

Scott Bicheno

Editorial Director