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Bottom Line Up Front Morgan Stanley estimates Chinese makers account for roughly 90% of the 13,000 to 16,000 humanoid robots expected to ship globally in 2025, with state-affiliated buyers placing over 2 billion yuan (around $296 million) in early procurement orders and the deployed fleet projected to reach 260,000 units by 2030. TGOOD launched a compute-power island on June 6, pairing renewable generation with AI compute at conversion economics of 0.5 yuan (7.5 cents) per kWh yielding about 10 yuan ($1.48) of token value, the first commercial site aligned with language from China's 2026 Government Work Report. Moonshot is in talks for a $2 billion round at a $30 billion valuation, its third round in six months and the highest cumulative funding among Chinese large-model startups. |
| Morgan Stanley pegs Chinese makers at 90% of 2025 humanoid output Chinese manufacturers will account for roughly 90% of the 13,000 to 16,000 humanoid robots expected to ship globally in 2025, according to a Morgan Stanley research note summarized by 36Kr. Chinese state-affiliated entities placed more than 2 billion yuan in early humanoid procurement orders in 2025, for deployment across power maintenance, data center operations, public services and entertainment. Annual Chinese humanoid sales are projected to double to about 28,000 units in 2026, with the deployed fleet rising from 12,000 units as of 2026 to 260,000 in 2030. |
| TGOOD opens what it calls the world's first compute-power island Power equipment maker TGOOD launched the site on June 6, TMTPost reported. It pairs renewable generation with AI compute, citing conversion economics of 0.5 yuan per kWh of new-energy electricity yielding roughly 10 yuan of token commercial value. The deployment is the first commercial site aligned with the "compute-power coordination" language in China's 2026 Government Work Report, building on a kWh-to-tokens narrative aired by CCTV Finance on June 5. The underlying technology comes from TGOOD's charging subsidiary, TELD. |
| Beijing folds private rockets into China's space station cargo procurement A winning-candidate notice published June 5 formally incorporates private rockets into China's space station cargo transportation system, Jiemian News reported. The announcement named four private launch firms shortlisted to serve the Light Boat cargo spacecraft, the first time station resupply has been opened to private companies through public tender. |
| Moonshot in talks for a $2 billion round at a $30 billion valuation Beijing-based large-model lab Moonshot AI is in talks for a new round of up to $2 billion, or about 13.6 billion yuan, at a target valuation of $30 billion, or roughly 203.5 billion yuan, 36Kr reported, relaying Zhidx. The round would be Moonshot's third in six months, after a roughly $2 billion round last month led by Meituan Longzhu and a December 2025 round at $4.3 billion. Cumulative Moonshot funding now exceeds 37.6 billion yuan across six rounds, the highest of any Chinese large-model startup. Moonshot is also preparing a Hong Kong listing. |
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| Alibaba's Gaode releases a 3D city world model running on consumer GPUs Gaode, Alibaba's mapping unit, released ABot-Earth0.5 on June 8, a 3D-native city world model, ITHome reported. The model builds kilometer-scale 3D scenes from a single satellite image or text description in about 10 minutes on a consumer-grade GPU. It covers more than 190 countries and regions, with output exported as editable 3D Gaussian Splatting assets compatible with Unity and Unreal Engine. Gaode says 3D mapping cost drops to roughly 1% of conventional methods, with throughput about 1,000 times higher. Internal testing applications opened via a Gaode portal. |
| Tencent opens WeChat AI access to the mini-program ecosystem Tencent's WeChat open platform published developer guidance on June 8 covering two mini-program access modes for WeChat AI, ITHome reported. The assistant is in closed testing. The automatic mode authorizes WeChat AI to read mini-program source code during submission review and to operate pages directly, while the developer-customized mode allows tailored integration after platform evaluation. WeChat AI service terms authorize the assistant to invoke, access and operate mini-programs, and to auto-generate skills from mini-program code. Developer opt-in is voluntary and does not affect existing mini-program service. |
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| III | ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS | |
| Chinese robotics sector logs four funding rounds in four days Four Chinese robotics funding rounds closed between June 1 and June 3, TMTPost reported. The publication framed the sector as still in a cash-burn phase, with commercialization-loop closure as the next competitive frontier. The note arrives alongside an active humanoid IPO pipeline, with several robotics names clearing listing milestones the same week. |
| Seer Robotics clears IPO hearing as the "first robot brain stock" Seer Robotics passed its Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO hearing on June 7, TMTPost reported, positioning itself as the first listed Chinese robot brain company. Its products span controllers, software, robots and accessories. The clearance arrives six days after Unitree's June 1 STAR Market approval, stacking two robotics public-market events in seven days. |
| MSRA and Tsinghua publish VITRA pretraining framework for VLA dexterous manipulation Microsoft Research Asia and Tsinghua University introduced VITRA, a vision-language-action pretraining framework, 36Kr reported. VITRA converts unlabeled human-activity videos into VLA-aligned training data. The team built a dataset of 1 million video clips and 26 million frames of 3D hand-motion trajectories and auto-generated language instruction. Models pre-trained on the human-video corpus show zero-shot hand-action prediction in unseen environments and high success rates on dexterous manipulation after small amounts of real-robot fine-tuning. The paper title is "Scalable Vision-Language-Action Model Pretraining for Robotic Manipulation with Real-Life Human Activity Videos." |
| Heli Tianjin Robotics wins downhole and underwater orders in tens of millions yuan Heli (Tianjin) Robotics disclosed large-order wins for downhole and underwater intelligent systems totaling tens of millions yuan, 36Kr reported. The company has raised more than 550 million yuan cumulatively from backers including Daoyang Capital, Shenzhen Hi-Tech Investment, Tianjin Binhai Industry Investment and CICC Capital. Founder Hou Lidong is a Northeast Petroleum University professor and former engineer at CNOOC and Weatherford. Heli's product line covers downhole tools, core components and specialized robots for deep-earth and deep-water operations. |
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| Stepfun reportedly files Hong Kong IPO at up to $12 billion valuation Shanghai-based AI lab Stepfun is reportedly filing its Hong Kong IPO as early as Monday, June 8, at investor-implied valuation up to $12 billion, or about 81.5 billion yuan, ITHome reported, relaying Wall Street Journal sourcing. The filing would rank among Hong Kong's larger IPOs in recent years if completed, following Zhipu AI and MiniMax's January listings. Stepfun was founded by former Microsoft vice president Jiang Daxin in 2023, with Megvii founder Yin Qi appointed chairman earlier in 2026. Hong Kong shares of Zhipu and MiniMax have risen sharply from their January listing prices, with early-investor lockups expiring next month. |
| Zhipu AI and MiniMax face a "July siege" on A-share return filings Zhipu AI and MiniMax are heading into what TMTPost called a "July siege" of A-share return filings, building on Zhipu's June 1 STAR Market plan to raise up to 15 billion yuan and MiniMax's May 31 move to engage advisers and sign an IPO counseling agreement for an A-share STAR issuance. The editorial said public-market valuation anchors are shifting from "scarce track" framing toward moat-defensibility tests as multiple Chinese frontier-model labs queue for listings at once. The Zhipu and MiniMax A-share tracks would join the Moonshot and Stepfun Hong Kong filings reported the same day. |
| Huawei "Genius Youth" alum closes first-month funding for streaming video generation startup Wang Yuxin founded Xingjie Intelligence and closed a tens-of-millions yuan first round in the company's debut month, Leiphone exclusively reported. Wang is a Huawei "Genius Youth" program alum and former core technical member of Yuanshi Technology. Xingjie targets real-time, continuously interactive video generation rather than text-to-video or image-to-video tools. Wang previously led 200-billion-plus parameter model training at Yuanshi and headed the team that released the XBai o4 open-source parallel-reasoning model at end-2025. |
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