In a move that screams “hold my charging cable” to the rest of the robotics industry, Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer XPeng, Inc. announced it will break ground on a dedicated humanoid robot factory in the first quarter of 2026. The company isn’t just dipping its toes in the water; it’s planning to go from a patch of dirt in Guangzhou to full-scale mass production by the end of that same year. Yes, you read that correctly: groundbreaking to production in roughly nine months, a timeline that is aggressive even by the most optimistic tech standards.
This isn’t just an assembly line. XPeng’s robotics arm, XPENG Robotics, envisions a “full-chain” facility that integrates everything from research and development to manufacturing and sales. The 110,000-square-meter base is intended to solve what XPeng calls core bottlenecks in the industry: a lack of training data and high barriers to mass production. The goal is to churn out its IRON humanoid robot—a bipedal bot standing 178 cm tall with highly dexterous hands—for both industrial customers and, eventually, your living room.
Why is this important?
Because another major automaker is throwing its manufacturing might behind the humanoid robot dream, and its timeline is either visionary or pure insanity. While companies like Tesla continue to refine their Optimus bot with similarly ambitious but less concrete production timelines, XPeng is putting a firm, and frankly shocking, date on the calendar. By leveraging its existing automotive supply chain and high-volume manufacturing experience, XPeng aims to sidestep the “production hell” that plagues many hardware startups. Whether they can actually build a factory and a mass-producible humanoid robot in under a year is the multi-billion dollar question, but you can’t fault them for a lack of ambition.
