By Drew Bernstein
Publication Date: 2026-06-09 14:11:00
TOPSHOT – Three Unitree G1 humanoid robots are pictured at robotics company Unitree’s first retail store in Beijing in January 9, 2026. (Photo by Adek BERRY / AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
An Analysis of the Emperor (Elon Musk) and the Arms Dealer (Jensen Huang) AI Strategies
On June 1, 2026, Jensen Huang took the stage in Taipei ahead of Computex and announced that Nvidia’s first commercial humanoid robot — a nearly six-foot machine called the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid — would be built around hardware from China’s Unitree Robotics. The robot’s body comes from Unitree in Hangzhou, its hands from Singapore-based Sharpa, and its brain from Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU. Researchers at Stanford, ETH Zurich, and UC San Diego will be among the first to use it.
The next day, Unitree received IPO approval from the Shanghai Stock Exchange in a record 73 days from application to review — a speed that China’s state media portrayed as a signal of strategic intent rather than routine capital markets activity.
China Daily called the Nvidia-Unitree deal “a compelling example of how the respective industries of China and the US can leverage their unique strengths.”
The unspoken message: a huge win for China in what it sees as one of the defining technology competitions of the coming decades.
What We Mean by Physical AI
American technologists call it physical AI. Chinese policymakers call it embodied intelligence (具身智能, jùshēn zhìnéng). The terminology…