China’s local governments began racing to build humanoid robot centers in October 2023, after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released its first comprehensive road map for the industry, the “Guiding Opinions on the Innovative Development of Humanoid Robots,” which called for strengthening public technology infrastructure. Just 14 months later, 22 innovation centers had opened across the country, an unusually fast pace compared with two to three years for the first centers in the electric vehicle and semiconductor sectors. Three years in, concerns about overinvestment remain widespread, with critics saying missteps from the battery and solar industries are being repeated. Most local governments operate centers with robot makers, buying robots and producing training data, while operating costs are covered by selling data externally, though demand is not yet sufficient. Beijing’s Shijingshan district center recently terminated its contract with partner RealMan, citing data quality below expectations and weak sales revenue. Analysts say China accepts the contradiction for speed, aiming to secure vast data and gain an edge over the United States as competition shifts from hardware to the robot’s “brain.” Samsung Securities concluded that “the real bottleneck remains in the cerebrum.” Fudan University’s Chen Tao said current robot vision-language-action models have plenty of success data but too little failure data. According to Scale AI, China accounts for about 90% of commercially available robot AI data.