China’s humanoid robot industry is showing all the classic signs of an investment bubble, and Beijing itself just said it out loud.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s most powerful economic planning body, publicly warned that the sector is “overheated” and faces the risk of forming a speculative bubble.
When the agency that functions as a hybrid of a ministry of economy, national investment authority, and modern Gosplan issues that kind of statement, people listen.
Right now, roughly 150 Chinese companies are trying to build human-like robots. Trade shows are packed with shiny bipedal machines that can walk, wave, fold laundry (slowly), pour tea, and dance in perfect synchronization.
Local governments hand out subsidies, venture funds throw nine-figure checks, and every week another startup announces it will deliver “mass adoption within three years.” The hype level sits somewhere between the EV boom and the consumer-drone mania of the mid-2010s.
Yet almost none of these robots are doing commercially meaningful work today. Factories still prefer fixed arms that never tire, elderly care facilities still rely on human staff, and households are not lining up to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a domestic helper that struggles to open a fridge without toppling over.
The gap between polished demos and deployable, cost-effective products remains enormous. Unlike generative AI, which leaped from amusing chatbots to billion-dollar revenue streams almost overnight, humanoid robots still live almost entirely in the pilot-and-prototype zone.
This is what makes the bubble risk genuine. Money is flooding in long before the technology is ready for large-scale, profitable use. When the promised “killer applications” keep failing to materialize, investors eventually notice that the emperor is still naked — only now dressed in expensive carbon-fiber skin.
Beijing has seen this movie before. The script is familiar: solar panels, electric vehicles, smartphones, high-speed rail equipment, home appliances — the pattern repeats.
Phase 1: Hundreds of companies sprout, fueled by cheap capital and patriotic enthusiasm.
Phase 2: Overcapacity emerges, prices crash, margins evaporate.
Phase 3: The central government steps in, tightens credit, raises barriers, and quietly orchestrates mergers or bankruptcies.
Phase 4: From the wreckage emerge three to six “national champions” that dominate the globe for decades.
The humanoid robot sector is entering Phase 2 and will soon be steered into Phase 3. Of today’s 150 players, probably fewer than ten will still exist as independent entities a few years from now, and only three or four will matter globally. The rest will be acquired, merged, or starved of funding once the NDRC signals that the party is over.
That consolidation will be brutal, but it is also the only realistic path to true mass adoption.
The survivors will have:
- Deep enough pockets to keep burning cash on R&D for another half-decade or more
- Direct government support for real-world testing in hospitals, factories, and logistics centers
- Economies of scale that finally drag unit costs down from “luxury toy” territory to something industries and middle-class households can justify
- Political blessing to export aggressively and set de facto global standards
In short, the same playbook that turned China from a non-entity into the world’s largest producer of EVs, solar panels, and battery cells is about to be applied to walking, talking, human-shaped machines.
When that happens, today’s bubble chatter will look quaint. The companies that survive the coming shakeout will no longer be selling cute demo bots at trade fairs; they will be installing thousands of units in warehouses, hotels, retirement homes, and production lines, both at home and abroad. They will have solved (or dramatically reduced) the remaining hard problems: battery life, dexterous manipulation, safe interaction with untrained humans, and above all, a total cost of ownership that beats hiring a person for repetitive or dangerous tasks.
So yes, a humanoid-robot bubble is inflating right now in China. But unlike many historical bubbles that simply burst and vanished, this one will almost certainly be deliberately deflated and reshaped by the state into something far larger and more durable. Today’s overinvestment and duplication are the necessary (and, from Beijing’s perspective, acceptable) price for creating tomorrow’s global leaders.
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The world may one day look back at this moment the same way it now views the chaotic early years of Chinese solar or EVs: a money-losing mess nobody wanted to touch — until suddenly the survivors buried the previous global leaders under an avalanche of cheap, high-quality products.
The humanoid robot bubble is real. Paradoxically, it is also the strongest signal that China is about to take this industry deadly seriously — and when China takes an industry seriously, the rest of the world usually ends up playing catch-up.
Author: Slava Vasipenok
Founder and CEO of QUASA (quasa.io) — the world's first remote work platform with payments in cryptocurrency.
Innovative entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in IT, fintech, and blockchain. Specializes in decentralized solutions for freelancing, helping to overcome the barriers of traditional finance, especially in developing regions.
