China’s Humanoid Bots Were Everywhere at America’s Top Tech Show

One of Elon Musk’s worries was on full display at CES in Las Vegas this week. Chinese-made human-like robots were everywhere across the exhibition floor, playing table tennis, sweeping floors and practicing kung fu.

China’s latest robotics innovations were delivered to the heart of America’s technology showcase, serving a constant reminder of the technological race between the world’s two biggest economies. While Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. hosted keynotes touting ever faster artificial intelligence chips, a legion of budding Chinese robot creators occupied much humbler booths with machines giving life to the notion of physical AI.

Fourier Intelligence Co. unveiled its latest GR-3 humanoid; Booster Robotics deployed over 30 robots in synchronized choreography; X-Humanoid demonstrated the sprinting speed of its Tiangong Ultra, winner of last year’s Beijing humanoid half-marathon; and Unitree showcased acrobatic routines performed by a dozen machines. Booths operated by Galbot, AgiBot and EngineAI showed off multitasking capabilities and industry-ready systems to prospective buyers, signaling ambitions to expand overseas and translate technical prowess into global sales.

“China’s humanoid robotics market is innovating at an extraordinary pace,” said Nadav Orbach, founder and chief executive officer of California-based RealSense Inc. The country spawned more than 40 humanoid startups in 2025 alone, according to Orbach, whose company supplies visual perception systems to 60% of humanoid robot makers globally.

Advances in AI and declining hardware costs are heating up the global competition in this field, with US tech leaders like Musk concerned about the pace of progress in China. Musk still expects Tesla Inc.’s Optimus to be the eventual winner, he’s said, but the rest of the top 10 might be all Chinese.

Still, a wide gap remains between choreographed demonstrations and large-scale, real-world deployment.

“As Jensen Huang of Nvidia says, we await the ChatGPT moment of robotics,” said Lei Yu, chief business officer of Galaxea Dynamics. “Chinese humanoid makers are preparing for the value of physical AI that’s still to come.” The two-year-old Beijing-based startup designs AI systems for the humanoids industry as well as building human-like bots and hardware, which it showcased at CES. It raised $100 million last year and counts Stanford University among its customers.

Globally, the focus is shifting to refining the reasoning and vision language models that humanoids need to enter real life and carry out seemingly simple tasks, said Orbach. “We want humanoids to respond to commands like ‘get me a cold soda’ and not an exhausting, 200-line set of instructions before fetching a drink. This is, to put it bluntly, very hard.”

©2026 Bloomberg L.P.

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