Unitree Robotics closed its Shanghai IPO up 460 percent, valuing China’s leading humanoid robot maker at roughly $50 billion, according to Bloomberg. The Decoder reported on August 20 that a Financial Times investigation found much of the demand behind Unitree’s robots comes from centers backed by local governments, which purchase the machines and then sell the resulting training data back to the same companies that built them. The structure mirrors the vendor-financed circularity now under scrutiny in the US AI buildout, this time running through Beijing’s industrial policy instead of Silicon Valley balance sheets.
Workers at these centers operate the robots remotely to demonstrate physical skills, a process called teleoperation, then bundle the resulting motion recordings and sell them back to manufacturers such as Unitree and Leju, the FT reported. Local governments frequently co-fund the centers alongside the manufacturers themselves, meaning the same public and corporate capital that subsidizes production also subsidizes the appearance of demand for it. Interact Analysis counted just over 90 of these centers operating nationwide by June.
“It also blurs the distinction between independent demand and demand created within a policy-supported ecosystem,” said analyst Poe Zhao, per the FT. Producing the footage for a single five-minute robot dance routine can cost as much as one million yuan, roughly $148,000, the outlet reported, a price tag that turns the centers into a meaningful revenue line on their own.
The reliance shows up in company financials. At Leju, these training centers generated 45 percent of sales for its flagship robot, the FT found. Unitree draws even more from the same pool: education and research customers, the category that includes the centers, supplied close to three quarters of the company’s humanoid robot revenue across the first three quarters of last year.
The data itself draws doubts from the people producing it. Interact Analysis’s Marco Wang told the FT the collected footage isn’t fully reliable, since the robots never operate in real-world settings outside the centers. A center manager put a number on it: only two or three of every eight hours logged are actually usable.
The valuation carries its own skepticism. Bloomberg put Unitree’s IPO pricing at 35.89 times revenue, well above the roughly 20 times multiple carried by its Hong Kong-listed peers. “There’s clearly no fundamental basis for the share price surge,” said Vey-Sern Ling of Union Bancaire Privée. Early-stage investors are already positioning for an exit, according to the FT.
The parallel to Nvidia is direct. The chipmaker has been backing customer purchases of its own chips, most recently as a guarantor behind OpenAI’s Ohio data center commitment, a structure AI Insiders covered yesterday. Beijing appears to endorse this approach rather than police it. About a fifth of Unitree’s IPO shares went to strategic backers, among them DeepSeek, and state-driven demand has previously built China’s dominant global positions in electric vehicles and solar panels.
The open question is the same one hanging over the US buildout: whether circular financing reflects genuine demand outrunning available capital, or demand manufactured to justify capital already committed. China’s humanoid sector and the US data center boom are now two independent test cases for that same wager, running through two different political systems toward the same accounting problem.
Investors pricing humanoid robotics suppliers should isolate what share of revenue traces back to policy-linked buyers before treating unit sales as proof of standalone demand. If centers like the ones supplying Leju and Unitree pull back funding next year, the valuations built on 2025 numbers will need to reprice fast.
Reporting by Maximilian Schreiner for The Decoder, published August 20, 2026, citing an investigation by the Financial Times and data from Bloomberg and Interact Analysis.
