EV Maker XPeng’s Robotics Arm Raises $900M+ in China’s Largest Embodied AI Round

Car companies building robots isn’t unusual anymore. Tesla is pushing Optimus, BYD is set to unveil its first humanoid this month, and Xiaomi already has CyberOne “interning” at its own factory. Hyundai Motor Group, through Boston Dynamics, is ramping up Atlas deployment on factory floors, and autonomous-driving company Mobileye acquired Israeli humanoid startup Mentee Robotics for $900 million. Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics startup founded by a Rivian co-founder, raised $500 million of its own. Now it’s XPeng Robotics, the robotics arm of Chinese EV maker XPeng: it has raised over $900 million at a post-money valuation above $6.3 billion — the largest single-round private raise to date in China’s embodied AI industry, the field of building robots that work with a physical body in the real world.

XPeng was founded in 2014 as an electric vehicle maker, dual-listed on the NYSE (XPEV) and Hong Kong Stock Exchange (9868). It now describes itself as a “Physical AI” company. At the center of that pitch is Turing, the AI chip XPeng designed in-house. Each chip packs a 40-core processor and dual neural processing units for 750 TOPS of compute — about three times the performance of an Nvidia Orin-X, according to the company. Turing was originally built for autonomous driving and cockpit compute in XPeng’s own EVs and has shipped in several models, including the G7, since last year. The robotics arm’s flagship product, its next-generation humanoid IRON, carries three Turing chips for a combined 2,250 TOPS. IRON has 76 degrees of freedom across its body and 21 in each hand, and its on-device compute lets it handle complex tasks autonomously — without remote operation and without sending data off the robot. XPeng builds the chips, controllers, motion modules, and hands in-house, and is applying the manufacturing infrastructure it built for EVs directly to robot mass production.

Founder He Xiaopeng has been researching robotics since 2016. In June, he told employees in an internal letter that he would take over as CEO of the robotics division himself, six months ahead of the company’s mass-production target. The robot went viral last November at XPeng’s AI Day, when IRON’s runway walk looked so human that Chinese social media accused the company of hiding a person inside — prompting He to personally unzip the robot’s back on stage to prove it wasn’t.

The round was led by IDG Capital, with participation from Gaorong Ventures and strategic backing from Tencent and Alibaba. The funds go toward software and hardware R&D, training and iterating XPeng’s Physical AI models, generating high-quality data, building end-to-end mass-production facilities, and expanding commercially worldwide. IRON is expected to enter mass production by the end of 2026, with initial deployment at XPeng’s own stores and campuses before a formal launch and deliveries in China and overseas markets in 2027. XPeng retains controlling ownership of the robotics business after the round, which stays consolidated into the group’s financial statements.

“The embodied AI industry stands at a pivotal juncture, transitioning from technical breakthroughs to scalable manufacturing and commercial deployment,” IDG Capital said, citing XPeng’s integrated stack across edge AI processors, Physical AI foundation models, and complete robotic systems, plus its synergies with the EV and autonomous-driving businesses. He Xiaopeng said the company’s 12 years of full-stack in-house R&D had built the foundation for this moment, and that the funding would help it attract more world-class Physical AI talent.

Tesla, BYD, and Hyundai are all racing in the same direction, and the field keeps getting more crowded. Tesla is targeting limited Optimus commercialization in 2026 and volume shipments in 2027, while Hyundai and Boston Dynamics are aiming for 30,000 Atlas units a year by 2028. For more on the broader robotics landscape, see here.