The first full chain humanoid factory

They will cover all stages of robot manufacturing.

Chinese manufacturer Xpeng Robotics, the same company behind the controversial presentation of a humanoid robot so realistic in its gait that many thought it was fake, announced that it will begin construction of a huge production base dedicated exclusively to humanoid robots in the first quarter of 2026.

The facility will be located in Guangzhou and will cover around 110,000 m², a complex capable of controlling the entire robot life cycle, from research and testing to large-scale manufacturing. The company describes the project as the industry's first full-chain humanoid factory. This means that it will be possible to develop hardware, train artificial intelligence, validate prototypes and produce commercial units without relying on external suppliers.

This reveals a problem that the entire industry has begun to notice, because creating artificial intelligence is no longer the biggest challenge; the real bottleneck now is what is known as physical intelligence, that is, making the robot work with AI installed directly in it. According to Xpeng Robotics, there is a lack of quality training data, a lack of prepared supply chains, and a lack of industrial processes capable of transforming prototypes and reliable products.

The new factory was created precisely to solve this problem. The robot to be made on this production line is the IRON model, now in its eighth generation. It will be around 1.78 cm tall, weigh 70 kg, and have a bionic structure designed to mimic the human body, including a kind of artificial spine and layers that simulate muscles.

The processing will be handled by three artificial intelligence chips developed by Xpeng Robotics itself, capable of performing more than 2,000 trillion operations per second. The company also plans to use lighter and safer solid-state batteries and a multimodal architecture that combines vision, language and action in real time, but the most important detail is not in the specifications, it is in the strategy.

Xpeng Robotics wants to use the same expertise it already has in electric car production to accelerate the manufacture of humanoid robots, avoiding mistakes that have held back the sector for years, such as mechanical failures, durability issues and difficulty in scaling up production. The difference is that this time the product is not a car, it is a humanoid worker.

Xpeng Robotics' first robots are set to begin working as receptionists and assistants in the company's own showrooms later this year, but the real goal is different: mass production by the end of 2026.