Unitree Technology holds partner conference, launches $10 million Physical AI competition and ecosystem incubation program

Unitree Technology's stock price hit its first limit-up since listing.

On October 23, Unitree Technology's stock price rose 20% to the limit-up, closing at 624 yuan per share, with total market value returning above 250 billion yuan and single-day market value rising more than 40 billion yuan. Previously, the company had continued to undergo a pullback and on the 15th hit a stage low stock price. Recently, the company's stock price has shown signs of recovery, with the stock accumulating a gain of more than 54% over six trading days.

A day earlier, the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Conference was held in Hangzhou. A Yicai reporter learned that this is the first time Unitree Technology has held an industry conference of this scale since its founding ten years ago.

"In the future, annual robot production could reach at least ten million units"

Wang Xingxing shared some positive progress from GPT-6's internal company testing, such as footage of directly controlling a robot under completely zero training. In his view, in a sense, some of GPT-6's capabilities can already solve part of the robot's planning problems. With the continuous iteration of large models, physical AI may see more progress, possibly in one to two years at the fastest, or two to three years at the slowest. According to him, Unitree is also developing its own models and cooperating with large-model companies at home and abroad to jointly push physical AI faster across the critical point.

He mentioned that Unitree currently produces roughly tens of thousands of robots a year, as well as hundreds of thousands of joint motors and modules, but if true large-scale popularization is to be achieved, current production capacity is far from enough. "If in the future many factories, shopping malls and homes all have a robot, the market size will be very huge, and annual production could reach at least ten million units."

This judgment about the future of scale was also reflected in the heat of this conference and the displays.

Unitree laid out its full series of robot products at once, and the newly released "Kung Fu Robot" H2-X was also greeting guests at the entrance, with customers and agents from around the world attending the conference. In addition, there were displays of multiple implementation scenario cases such as education and research, emergency firefighting, inspection applications, commercial services, and culture and entertainment, and many dexterous hand manufacturers also participated in this event.

It is worth mentioning that at the conference site, many companies wanted to reach cooperation with Unitree Technology.

One attendee came specially from Guangdong, and his company wanted to purchase a batch of robot dog products for inspection in manufacturing factories. He said that the company mainly provides intelligent solutions, and many factory clients it serves have recently reported monitoring needs. The company is also considering expanding this new business and is screening products with higher cost performance.

From selling bodies to building an ecosystem, competing for entrepreneurs

According to Wang Xingxing, the World Physical AI Competition will gather global forces to break through key bottlenecks in physical AI. The on-site PPT showed that the annual support amount is 10 million US dollars (determined after the final annual award evaluation each year, not a fixed value), and the recipients are teams or individuals that achieve outstanding technological breakthroughs in the current year, with no geographical or other thresholds. The competition categories include arbitrary movement, track and field, combat, dexterous operation, production and construction, sports events, full-modal human-machine interaction, health care, and others.

The "Yuchuang Plan" is aimed at teams that have already established companies or have a clear entrepreneurial direction, recruiting entrepreneurs who possess core technology, product capabilities or industrial resources and are committed to promoting the commercial implementation of embodied intelligence. The key recruitment directions of this plan are industry application solutions, developer tools and ecosystem software, data and simulation platforms, robot bodies and core components, embodied intelligence algorithm models, global markets and channel services, and others.

This long-term strategic investment is estimated to have a collaborative scale of several billion yuan over the next five years, and plans to incubate more than 200 high-quality ecosystem enterprises.

It is not hard to see that Unitree Technology not only wants to sell hardware bodies, but also plans to further expand its ecosystem layout.

The reporter noted that companies in the industry such as Zhiyuan and Xinghaitu have similar moves. Zhiyuan released the Yuansheng ecosystem development plan this year, with total investment exceeding 2 billion yuan over the next five years, aiming to cover a thousand-level scientific research institutions, link ten-thousand-level ecosystem partners, cultivate one-hundred-thousand-level developers, and reach one-million-level end users. Xinghaitu, together with Cathay Capital, jointly launched the entrepreneurial partner plan "Xingtu Plan," providing capital, technology and industrial resources to early-stage embodied intelligence startup teams, with plans to invest 1 billion yuan over five years.

Previously, Cai Bingzhen, director of the Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute, analyzed in an interview with the reporter that the development of embodied intelligence is still in an early stage, and supporting ecosystem partners will promote the development of the industry and the industrial chain. Some industry insiders also believe that ecosystem layout is also a kind of strategic positioning. The most typical example is Nvidia, which relies on ecosystem advantages to lock in developers and form demand scale.