- Humanoid robots starred in China’s Spring Festival gala performance
- The event is China’s most-watched TV show, garnering 23 billion views
- Some of the robots on display now have backorder as interest is increasing
China gave the world a glimpse of its latest humanoid robots at its 2026 Spring Festival Gala on Monday — and the show was so impressive that many of its robo-stars are now reportedly back-ordered.
The Spring Festival Gala is broadcast annually on the eve of the Lunar New Year and is China’s most watched television show. State-owned broadcaster China Central Television claimed the show got an incredible 23 billion views across all platforms.
To put that in context, Super Bowl LX drew 137.8 million live viewers on NBCUniversal platforms, with its halftime show getting 4 billion views in the first 24 hours.
It was no coincidence that kung fu robots were the centerpiece of this year’s show. China is entering the first year of its next five-year plan, and robotics has been highlighted as a major growth engine. That meant the stage was set for the likes of Unitree Robotics, the nation’s largest robot manufacturer, to show how far ahead of Tesla it is now.
The Unitree G1 robot was the viral breakout from the show, with its martial arts tricks (see video below) so athletic that many suspected the videos were AI-generated. In reality, the G1 is an expensive, high-end humanoid that was able to flourish in a highly controlled environment.
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That hasn’t stopped interest from surging after its kung fu exhibition. The G1 costs around 85,000 yuan in China (about $12,300 / £9,100 / AU$17,400), so it’s not exactly a consumer impulse buy. Still, the South China Morning Post claims that the earliest delivery dates for the G1 have been pushed back to early March and that its product page has been creaking under the weight of interest.
The more interesting robot, if a little less athletic, is probably the Noetix Bumi. The child-sized robot appeared in a comedy skit at the Spring Festival Gala and costs just 10,000 yuan ($1,450 / £1,070 / AU$2,050), making it look like a high-end smartphone. It was again apparently the subject of a lot of interest at retailer JD.com, and its delivery date has now been pushed back to the end of April.
None of these robots are breaking sales records, but they are part of a trend of humanoids blending ever closer to the mainstream. The South China Morning Post again claims that Unitree aims to ship 20,000 humanoids this year, about four times more than by 2025.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, recently said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that Tesla will start selling its Optimus humanoid robot “probably sometime next year.” At that point, they may have some catching up to do.
Waiting for ’embedded intelligence’ breakthrough
The big question with all these humanoid robots is still what they are really for and who they will serve.
Consumers are still interested spectators rather than buyers, with Unitree Robotics getting most of its investment from industry giants and venture capital firms. Rivals like UBTech have made deals to have their humanoid robots at border crossings, which, as we’ve previously considered, is not a dystopian nightmare at all.
Regardless of where they end up living their lives, Unitree believes the game changer for robots is not their impressive athleticism, but their minds. The company’s CEO and founder, Wang Xingxing, recently spoke about the potential of ’embodied intelligence’, which is a robot’s ability to learn by physically interacting with its environment, rather than being trained like today’s AI models.
“If there are breakthroughs in embedded AI models and robotics that can really be applied on a large scale in the coming years, the heat could be 100 or even 1,000 times higher than it is now,” Wang told China’s CCTV state broadcaster. “I think this will far surpass the mobile internet era.”
That’s a big claim, but these breakthroughs are also a big ‘if’. As impressive as the Unitree G1’s acrobatics are at the moment, they’re still something of a flashy tech demo. But 2026 and the year of the Fire Horse may yet pave the way for the really big robot leap – and if that happens, people like Tesla may be fighting for a place on the podium.
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