XPENG

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

XPeng said on September 8, 2026 that its IRON humanoid robot has started coming off a production line with more than 80% of core processes automated, ahead of mass production at the end of 2026 and deliveries in 2027. Two weeks earlier its robotics subsidiary Dogotix agreed to raise more than US$900 million at a post-money valuation above US$6.3 billion, including US$600 million from IDG Capital, Alibaba, Tencent and Gaorong Ventures.

Mind Robotics, the industrial AI robotics company founded and led by Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe, said on March 11, 2026 that Accel and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $500 million Series A, about four months after a $115 million seed. Rivian's filings show it deconsolidated the start-up in March, valued its remaining 37.6% at about $569 million using the Series A share price and recorded a $506 million gain, which by MEKAWIRE arithmetic implies an equity value near $1.51 billion.

Hyundai Motor Group agreed on February 27, 2026 to invest about 9 trillion won from 2026 in a robotics, AI and hydrogen hub at Saemangeum in North Jeolla. The plan includes a 400 billion won robot cluster with a finished-robot factory sized for about 30,000 units a year, a contract-manufacturing foundry and a parts complex, due in 2029, next to a 5.8 trillion won AI data centre scaled in phases to 50,000 GPUs.

UBTech Robotics agreed on 25 November 2025 to place 31.468 million new H shares at HK$98.80, raising about HK$3.11 billion, and earmarked 75% of the net proceeds for investing in or acquiring upstream and downstream companies. Eight days earlier the Shenzhen company said its Walker S2 industrial humanoid had entered mass production and delivery, with orders since the start of 2025 above RMB800 million.

XPeng used its 2025 AI Day in Guangzhou on 5 November to show a redesigned IRON humanoid with 82 degrees of freedom, 22-degree-of-freedom hands, three in-house Turing AI chips and an all-solid-state battery. The carmaker said it aims for large-scale mass production by the end of 2026, starting with guide and retail roles, and named Baosteel as an industrial partner.

NVIDIA introduced Isaac GR00T N1.5 and the Isaac GR00T-Dreams blueprint at Computex 2025 in Taipei, saying its researchers used Cosmos-generated video to build the model's training data in 36 hours instead of nearly three months of human data collection. The 3-billion-parameter model, opened on June 11, 2025 for non-commercial use, doubled language-following accuracy on Fourier's GR-1 humanoid in NVIDIA's own tests, while AeiROBOT, Foxlink, Foxconn and NEURA Robotics signed on to parts of the stack.

NVIDIA on 6 January 2025 launched Cosmos, a platform of world foundation models, video tokenizers and data-curation tools that generate physics-aware video for training robots and autonomous vehicles, releasing the first models under a licence that permits commercial use. It named 14 robotics and self-driving developers plus Uber as early adopters, and the same day unveiled an Isaac GR00T Blueprint that turns a few human demonstrations into large synthetic motion datasets for humanoids.