China now has its own AI circular financing scheme
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Chinese robot maker Unitree Robotics saw its stock surge as much as 629 percent during its Shanghai IPO, closing up 460 percent and valuing the company at around $50 billion. The company raised 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million), becoming the first publicly traded humanoid robot maker on the Chinese mainland. However, a Financial Times report reveals that much of the demand rests on a circular model: state-backed training centers buy robots from manufacturers, use humans to teach them tasks via teleoperation, and then sell the collected training data back to the same manufacturers. Local governments and manufacturers often co-fund these centers, and by June there were more than 90 such facilities. Nearly three-quarters of Unitree's humanoid revenue in the first nine months of 2025 came from education and research, while at rival Leju training centers accounted for 45 percent of flagship robot sales. Analysts doubt both the usefulness of the data, noting that only two to three of every eight training hours are usable, and the valuation, which stood at 35.89 times revenue compared with about 20 times for Hong Kong rivals. Critics see the arrangement as a policy-supported ecosystem that blurs independent demand, though Beijing appears to support the sector, with about 20 percent of the IPO going to strategic investors including AI startup Deepseek.
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