BEIJING — Chinese electric-vehicle maker Xpeng has activated a production line dedicated to humanoid robots and will begin mass production within the year. The company plans to build IRON — the humanoid that drew attention when it was unveiled last year for movements so natural that some suspected a person was disguised as a robot — into a second growth engine.
Xpeng said on the 8th that it had officially activated the humanoid robot production line in Guangzhou and completed production of the first IRON unit. The finished robot walked off the production line on its own, without assistance. "This means we have moved beyond building research and development prototypes into manufacturing on a production line," the company said.
According to Xpeng, automation exceeds 80% across the line's core processes. The company said it applied the automotive-grade quality control system it built up in electric-vehicle manufacturing to robot production, improving precision and production consistency. He Xiaopeng, Xpeng's founder, said the company had built a production line from scratch for an entirely new product category with no precedent, and that it would continue to expand production speed and scale.
IRON has 76 degrees of freedom across its body, with 21 in each hand. It carries three Turing AI chips developed in-house by Xpeng, delivering computing performance of up to 2,250 TOPS, or 2,250 trillion operations per second. The company said a physical AI foundation model is installed directly on the robot, allowing it to carry out complex tasks autonomously without remote control.
When IRON was first unveiled last year, its humanlike gait prompted speculation that a person was wearing a robot suit. Xpeng cut open part of the robot's outer shell at the event to reveal the mechanical structure inside, proving it was a real robot.
Xpeng plans to begin mass production of IRON late this year and deploy the robots first at its own stores and business sites, before starting formal sales in China and overseas markets next year. The company expects the gross profit margin per unit on general-purpose humanoid robots, which face high technological barriers to entry, to be far higher than that of new energy vehicles.
The company is also moving quickly on funding. Xpeng's robotics business raised more than $900 million (about 1.2 trillion won) last month from investors including IDG Capital, GL Ventures, Tencent and Alibaba. The business was valued at more than $6.3 billion (about 8.4 trillion won) after the investment. Xpeng said at the time that it was the largest single funding round on record in China's physical AI industry.
As Xpeng extends the manufacturing technology and supply chain it secured in electric vehicles into robotics, its business structure is broadening rapidly from automobiles toward physical AI. The company plans to develop automobiles, robots and its global business as three growth curves.
