Log in Sign up
News AMD's August Deal for Inference Chip Startup Taalas Was Worth $2.9 Billion, Filing Shows, With $1.4 Billion Contingent Business Google Expands Voluntary Exit Buyouts to Five More Countries, With Swiss Staff Offered Up to 12 Months' Pay Apple Intelligence Apple Cuts Engineers' Daily AI Spending Cap to $200, With Deeper Cuts on the Table Meta Meta Buys Conductor, the Startup Whose App Runs Multiple AI Coding Agents in Parallel News MoWorld 2.0 Debuts at Wuzhen: a 4D World Model Trained Entirely on Huawei's Ascend Security Sentra Raises $150 Million From Capital One Ventures to Rein In What AI Agents Can Read Business Kuaishou's Chip Spinoff Lingchuan Raises 1 Billion Yuan to Cut the Cost of AI Video Productivity Y Combinator President Garry Tan Says He Spends Up to $200,000 a Year on AI Tokens News AMD's August Deal for Inference Chip Startup Taalas Was Worth $2.9 Billion, Filing Shows, With $1.4 Billion Contingent Business Google Expands Voluntary Exit Buyouts to Five More Countries, With Swiss Staff Offered Up to 12 Months' Pay Apple Intelligence Apple Cuts Engineers' Daily AI Spending Cap to $200, With Deeper Cuts on the Table Meta Meta Buys Conductor, the Startup Whose App Runs Multiple AI Coding Agents in Parallel News MoWorld 2.0 Debuts at Wuzhen: a 4D World Model Trained Entirely on Huawei's Ascend Security Sentra Raises $150 Million From Capital One Ventures to Rein In What AI Agents Can Read Business Kuaishou's Chip Spinoff Lingchuan Raises 1 Billion Yuan to Cut the Cost of AI Video Productivity Y Combinator President Garry Tan Says He Spends Up to $200,000 a Year on AI Tokens

Nvidia's Humanoid Robot Reference Platforms Both Rest on Chinese-Made Robotic Hands

AI Agents · By: AIReport Admin · 23 hours ago · 👁 19
Nvidia's Humanoid Robot Reference Platforms Both Rest on Chinese-Made Robotic Hands

A CNBC review found that both humanoid reference platforms Nvidia has published this year depend on five-finger tactile hands from Chinese-founded startups: the May GR00T design pairs Unitree's H2 Plus body with Sharpa's Wave hand, while October's Agile ONE SN uses two Wuji Hand 2 units. The detail underlines that dexterous hands, not bodies or AI, remain the bottleneck.

For all the talk of sovereign AI factories and gigawatt data centers, one of Nvidia's most strategic hardware programs rests on two small suppliers most consumers have never heard of. A CNBC review of the chipmaker's humanoid robot efforts found that both reference platforms it has published this year use five-finger robotic hands developed or manufactured by Chinese-founded startups — a quiet illustration of how deep the robotics supply chain runs through China.

The first platform, unveiled May 31, is a humanoid reference design built on Nvidia's Isaac GR00T software stack. It pairs a Unitree H2 Plus robot body from Hangzhou with a Wave five-finger tactile hand from Sharpa. Nvidia said at the time that Unitree would supply the robot, with availability planned for the end of 2026. Sharpa is headquartered in Singapore but runs its manufacturing and R&D center in Shanghai, and was co-founded by David Li, the CEO of laser-radar maker Hesai.

The second platform arrived on October 21 at Nvidia's GTC event in Berlin, in partnership with German robotics firm Agile Robots. The Agile ONE SN combines Agile's ONE S robot body with two Wuji Hand 2 five-finger hands from Chinese startup Wuji. CEO Jensen Huang introduced the system on stage, calling it a "flywheel" for accelerating robotics development; Nvidia says research institutions including Stanford and ETH Zurich have expressed interest, with availability planned for early 2027. The robot stands 1.4 meters, weighs 43 kilograms, and offers 71 degrees of freedom across its body and hands, powered by Nvidia's Jetson Thor compute platform.

Wuji itself is a compact startup story: founded in 2019 by Pan Yunzhe, it later moved most of its team to Shenzhen and has raised money from investors including Ant Group, HSG and Future Capital, according to PitchBook. Its second-generation hand weighs about 1.2 kilograms, and a recent demo video showed it autonomously re-spinning a pen after a disturbance. Industry observers told CNBC the hand runs hot during sustained tasks, a common complaint in the dexterous-manipulation field.

How do the two hands stack up? Google DeepMind research lead Keerthana Gopalakrishnan compared them on a podcast last month, saying Sharpa's Wave is the stronger performer while Wuji's hand is closer to a typical human hand in size but has roughly the strength of a ten-year-old — informal assessments rather than benchmarked results. Zhu Mingxuan of humanoid startup JoyIn, who left Figure last year, was blunter: hardware is the limiting factor in humanoids today, and the hand is the main challenge.

The pattern extends beyond Nvidia. The Information reported last week, citing anonymous sources, that Meta is working with Shanghai-based Fourier on a humanoid prototype; neither company responded to requests for comment. Nvidia, for its part, has not said whether the first GR00T-based reference robots have started shipping on schedule. As Western governments pour billions into sovereign AI and domestic chipmaking, the humanoid hardware layer quietly reminds everyone where the dexterous end-effectors actually come from.

Comments (0)

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

No comments yet