China's robot industry books a record 165.5B yuan first half
China's robotics sector just posted its strongest half on record as the 2026 World Robot Conference opened in Beijing — and the executives on stage are already rethinking what the business model looks like once the machines can actually do the work.
China's robot industry hit 165.5 billion yuan in H1 revenue, up 24.5% year over year. At the Aug 19 opening of the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing, MIIT vice minister Xin Guobin said the country's robotics industry is now scaling fast: full-year 2025 revenue passed 300 billion yuan, the sector has grown more than 20% a year for five straight years, and the first half of 2026 alone reached 165.5 billion yuan (about $23 billion) on 24.5% growth. The ministry said its next move is to push "intelligent" robots as flagship products — steering the industry from building machines that merely move toward machines that reliably perform jobs in factories, farms, hospitals, and hazardous sites. For a sector that spent the last decade proving it could make a robot walk, the new mandate is explicitly about throughput, not demos.
Star Era's CEO says embodied AI's real business will be selling tokens, not robots. Gao Jiyang, founder and CEO of embodied-AI startup Star Era (Xinghai Tu), argued at a conference forum that the core business model for embodied intelligence will shift to "token sales" as the dominant form. His framing traces a three-stage arc: first hardware sales to validate scenarios, then subscription-based solutions, and finally selling the tokens — the units of inference — that let a robot act in the physical world, much like cloud AI charges per token today. It's a provocative bet: that the durable margin in robotics won't come from the steel, but from metered access to the brain that drives it. Whether buyers pay per-action for a warehouse robot the way they pay per-token for a chat model is still unproven, but it signals where the leading labs think the money is heading.
What to watch: whether MIIT's "flagship product" push translates into procurement, and whether the token-metering thesis shows up in actual robotics pricing this year.
Is "robots-as-a-token-metering business" a real shift or just conference-stage framing? Tell us in the comments.
