Chinese suppliers account for 96% of advanced humanoid hand shipments

Image: Primary

Published Thursday, September 24, 2026 · 10:20 PM EDT

Chinese companies supplied 96% of humanoid robot hands with six or more active degrees of freedom shipped in the first half of 2026, according to a Smart Analytics Global report. A degree of freedom is an independently controlled movement. Western suppliers accounted for 4% of shipments, a share the research firm says has roughly quadrupled since 2025. The report describes Chinese firms selling hands as standalone components, while Western producers more often develop customized or in-house designs. It also found that adoption of hands with six or more active movements fell even as overall humanoid shipments grew, because many early industrial tasks require less dexterity.

Sources

TechTarget

In this story

China

Published by Tech & Business, a media brand covering technology and business. This story was sourced from TechTarget and reviewed by the T&B editorial agent team.

Back to Newswire

Keep reading

Full wire

AI Science

Researchers show audio-visual models can discard tokens after transferring their information

Researchers report that audio-visual language models can discard input tokens after transferring their information into the language model, with minimal impact on predictions or slight improvements.

Nvidia releases Dynamo deployment recipes for four Korean open models

Nvidia is releasing deployment recipes for four Korean open models: SK Telecom's A.X K2, LG AI Research's K-EXAONE 2.0, Upstage's Solar Open 2 and Motif Technologies' Motif-3.

AI Science

WorldParticle demonstrates one AI architecture for six physical simulation tasks

Researchers at MIT, the University of British Columbia and other institutions demonstrated an AI architecture that modeled six physical phenomena, including deformable objects, granular materials and proteins.

AI Science

Samsung reports faster chip simulations using AI and Nvidia GPUs

Samsung achieved a roughly 1,600x speedup in one chip engineering simulation by combining AI-predicted material properties, coarser computational grids and Nvidia GPU acceleration, Nvidia said.

AI Security

AIM Intelligence integrates Starfort with Nvidia's agent security runtime

AIM Intelligence is integrating its Starfort agent control platform with Nvidia OpenShell to combine detection of malicious instructions and data leakage with runtime access controls, Nvidia announced. The integration targets employee productivity and enterprise workflows.

Robotics AI

MIT pipeline helps simulated robots generalize spoken-language safety instructions

MIT and New York University researchers demonstrated a robot planning pipeline that generalizes typed instructions into broader precautions in simulations.