South Korea, despite betting heavily on physical AI, remains largely a robotics powerhouse inside its own factory gates.
Korea has 1,220 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, the highest density in the world, according to the International Federation of Robotics. But that strength remains concentrated in conventional factory automation, while the country does not target mass production of humanoids until 2029.
China is already putting its humanoid champions into the capital market.
Unitree Robotics opened subscriptions Monday for a $904 million Shanghai IPO that would make it China’s first mainland-listed humanoid robot maker and the next marquee Chinese technology listing after memory-chip maker CXMT’s $8.6 billion STAR Market IPO last month. Retail demand for Unitree was more than 8,000 times the shares available, underscoring the investor frenzy surrounding China’s physical-AI push.
Unitree is selling 40.45 million new shares, or 10 percent of its enlarged capital, at 150.8 yuan each to raise about 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million). The price implies a market value of about 61 billion yuan, or roughly $9 billion, and a valuation of about 219 times 2025 earnings.
“Entering the capital market is a new starting point for Unitree,” founder and Chief Executive Wang Xingxing said during the IPO roadshow, pledging to deepen work on core technologies for general-purpose embodied intelligence.
The listing comes as China converts an early hardware advantage into shipment scale.
Global humanoid shipments reached about 19,100 units in the first half, up 272 percent from 5,100 a year earlier, according to research firm Smart Analytics Global. Shanghai-based AgiBot led with about 8,400 units, or 44 percent of the market, while Unitree shipped about 5,900, taking 31 percent.
Chinese companies together supplied more than 97 percent of the global total. More significantly, over 70 percent of shipments went to industrial and commercial applications, up from about half a year earlier — evidence that at least part of the market is beginning to move beyond demonstrations and research laboratories.
DeepSeek added another link between China’s AI and robotics ecosystems by investing 140.8 million yuan in Unitree’s IPO for a 2.31 percent stake through the strategic placement. The two companies also agreed to cooperate on AI models for humanoid robots.
South Korea’s diagnosis of its own position is blunt.
The Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials said in an April policy report that 2026 marks a commercial tipping point for humanoids and identified two major Korean weaknesses: a shortage of homegrown AI foundation models and a fragile supply chain for humanoid-specific components such as actuators and reducers.
Neither gap is closing overnight.
Korea’s government-backed sovereign AI competition is now down to LG AI Research, SK Telecom, Upstage and Motif Technologies, with one of the four due to be eliminated in the current second-stage evaluation. Naver Cloud was disqualified earlier for failing the project’s originality requirement, while NC AI failed to advance on its evaluation score.
What Korea has built at greater scale is the infrastructure to run AI.
Private groups have outlined about 550 trillion won of investment to build 8.4 gigawatts of AI data-center capacity by 2029. The National AI Computing Center broke ground in Haenam, South Jeolla Province, on Aug. 3 with a project cost of about 2.5 trillion won and plans for computing capacity equivalent to roughly 15,000 advanced GPUs by 2028.
But Korea’s humanoid timetable stretches further out.
The government’s manufacturing-AI strategy calls for an industrial humanoid foundation model by 2028 and annual production of at least 1,000 humanoid robots beginning in 2029. The broader K-Humanoid Alliance is bringing government, robot makers, component suppliers and AI companies together around that goal.
The United States has formidable names but, so far, little comparable shipment volume.
Tesla has been preparing its Fremont factory for Optimus production, but mass output has yet to materialize. Figure AI’s Figure 03 has begun work at BMW’s Spartanburg plant on logistics tasks after an earlier Figure 02 deployment, putting the robots into real factory operations but still far short of Chinese shipment volumes.
Boston Dynamics, owned by Hyundai Motor Group, unveiled the production version of its electric Atlas at CES 2026. Hyundai plans to deploy Atlas at its Georgia manufacturing operations from 2028 and aims to build manufacturing capacity for 30,000 robots a year by then — potentially giving Korea its most substantial route into humanoid scale, albeit through a U.S.-based subsidiary.
Washington, meanwhile, has erected a new regulatory barrier around the U.S. market on national-security grounds.
The Federal Communications Commission on July 28 added foreign-produced “advanced robotic devices,” including humanoids and quadrupeds, to its Covered List after an interagency national-security determination. New covered models generally cannot receive the FCC equipment authorization required for import, marketing or sale in the United States unless they receive conditional approval from the Department of War. Previously authorized models are exempt.
That rule offers Seoul no automatic shelter.
Unitree, meanwhile, has told investors that its existing humanoid and quadruped models already hold U.S. approvals, leaving the current lineup saleable while future models face uncertainty. U.S. sales accounted for 13.3 percent of Unitree’s revenue last year.
For now, Korea has a timetable and formidable manufacturing infrastructure. China has something more immediate: a market, shipment scale and now a pipeline of robot makers heading into public markets.
Unitree’s IPO makes the gap unusually visible. China is already financing the companies producing the first wave of humanoids at scale, while Korea is still building the models, components and production system it hopes will be ready for the next one.
AJP Takeaways
• Unitree’s $904 million IPO is poised to create China’s first mainland-listed humanoid robot maker, with its retail offering more than 8,000 times oversubscribed.
• Chinese manufacturers supplied more than 97 percent of the roughly 19,100 humanoids shipped globally in the first half of 2026, led by AgiBot at 44 percent and Unitree at 31 percent.
• South Korea has the world’s highest industrial-robot density but remains years from humanoid scale, targeting a robot AI foundation model in 2028 and production of at least 1,000 humanoids annually from 2029.
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