China’s AI robotics push: Unitree, CCTV and dexterous-hand startup surge

This cluster of Chinese news is less about a single breakthrough and more about the quiet normalization of embodied and applied AI in the physical economy. Unitree opening a national flagship store in a Beijing JD MALL, with consumer‑facing quadrupeds and humanoids on display, signals that legged robots are moving from lab demos to retail‑grade products. At the same time, ByteDance’s Volcengine becoming CCTV’s exclusive AI cloud partner for the Spring Festival Gala shows how large‑scale cultural events are becoming showcases for domestic AI stacks rather than just broadcast engineering.([t.cj.sina.com.cn](https://t.cj.sina.com.cn/articles/view/7857201856/1d45362c001901gpcg))

Add in an A++ round for dexterous‑hand maker Lingxin Qiaoshou and continued backing of a leading humanoid robotics firm by Shoucheng Holdings, and you see the contours of a hardware‑heavy AI ecosystem that’s distinct from the US focus on cloud APIs. China is pushing hard on embodied intelligence—hands, legs, and end‑effectors that can manipulate the real world at scale. For the race to AGI, that matters because many believe general intelligence will be tightly coupled to agents that can act, not just talk. The more capital and distribution muscle behind humanoid and robotic platforms, the faster we’ll see large models tightly integrated with real‑world actuators.

If Unitree‑style platforms and dexterous hands become cheap and ubiquitous, Chinese labs and startups could end up with a huge data and deployment advantage in robotics‑flavored AGI, even if their frontier language models occasionally lag behind US incumbents.