Everyone thinks China's robot factories are automated. They aren't. The robots are Chinese; the robots that make robots will be Western.
On Wednesday I toured Unitree's factory in Hangzhou, and I wasn't allowed to take pictures. In the building that makes the actuators, the motors that drive every joint, there were one or two new automated lines. The rest of the floor was filled with humans operating old-school winding machines. (Winding means wrapping copper wire around a motor's core.) I don't know what percentage of the motors are made on the automated lines.
But staffing the floor with humans made sense. Me with a Unitree humanoid in the showroom, the one place photos were allowed. Behind us, a row of robots lies face down.
Unitree has a viral video (28 million views) of a humanoid doing assembly in its own factory, which it calls "an actual deployment". Its IPO prospectus calls it a pilot, and says assembly is "currently mainly manual". At the end of 2025 all of Unitree's machinery was worth about $1.7 million on its books, at a company that made almost 32,000 robots that year: some $50 of machinery per robot! Unitree Embodied AI Model Manufactures Robots in Factory Based on Unitree's Unifo LM-X1-0 embodied AI model, this is an actual deployment at Unitree's own robot factory.
It doesn't need more. Labour was 8% of what it cost Unitree to make its robots in 2025, outsourced assemblers included, and most of the rest was parts. With those hands it made about 26,000 robot dogs in 2025, more than the roughly 20,000 IDC reckons the whole world shipped the year before.
So there's only so much a machine can save: halve a cost that's 8% of the bill and you save 4%. Unitree expects the motor line it's building to cut the labour in each motor by more than half, and the cost of one robot model by under 2%. Its labour per robot had roughly halved since 2023 (our arithmetic), and the filing credits scale, standardised processes and more skilled staff.
None of those is a machine; two are kaizen, and I named my company, KAIKAKU, after the other word. The bottom bars are why Unitree still builds by hand: it expects its new motor line to cut one robot model's cost by just 1.7%. The other reason Unitree builds by hand starts in the showroom.
Our host told us Unitree's CEO, Wang Xingxing, asked a G1 running GPT-6 to fetch him a bottle of water from another room. It did. Slowly.
Unitree's own slide puts robots' "Chat GPT moment", when they can do 80% of tasks they've never seen 80% of the time, two or three years out. That slide is from last year, so it's as soon as next year. Unitree's own slide from last year, as shown to us in Hangzhou: the "Chat GPT moment" for humanoids two to three years out, so as soon as next year.
Until then, humanoids are mostly toys for researchers: our host named Nvidia, Amazon, Meta and universities. Three quarters of Unitree's humanoid revenue came from research and education in the first nine months of 2025, and under 5% from factories or other industrial work (half or more of what Unitree files as "industry" is robots giving guided tours at companies!). When someone asked what the GD01, a rideable mecha from $650,000, is for, the answer was that Wang had wanted one since he was a child.
Unitree Unveils: GD01, A Manned Transformable Mecha, from $650,000 The world's first production-ready manned mecha. It can transform. It's a civilian vehicle.
It weighs ~500kg with you inside. Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a Friendly and Safe manner. A product without a job changes every year, and a custom machine only works if the product is kind of frozen, so a machine built for this year's robot is scrap next year.
It's like tailoring a suit for a teenager. Right now everything's ever-changing, except the motor. Unitree is automating its joint modules first because they're the parts its robots share most.
The same Wednesday I toured his factory, Wang told a conference in Wuzhen that Unitree had spent ten years.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing