How the US ceded the robotics economy to China

On the eve of the Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival Gala, one of the world’s most-watched television broadcasts, delivered more than just festive entertainment. It served as a high-definition manifesto of China’s “embodied AI” supremacy. International observers, from Reuters to El Pais, watched as humanoid robots from start-ups such as Unitree performed complex martial arts, backflips and synchronised dances.As Beijing-based tech analyst Poe Zhao noted, these humanoids represent the synthesis of China’s three-fold advantage: cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI), a peerless hardware supply chain and an unshakeable national will. Even Tesla founder Elon Musk recently conceded that his greatest rivals are Chinese, stating that people outside China underestimate them. The Spring Festival Gala proved him right.The sheer velocity of improvement – from simple rhythmic movement in 2025 to full acrobatic stunts in 2026 – suggests an evolutionary slope that the West is no longer climbing.The American establishment has comforted itself with the belief that AI is the domain of large language models, silicon chips and venture capital. But the gala highlighted how we are moving from a world where finance constrains reality to a world where physical reality constrains finance.The “brain” of AI might be a chip, but its “body” requires more electricity, more rare earths, steel and a power grid that doesn’t groan under the weight of a summer heatwave. While the US optimised its economy for advertising algorithms and financial engineering, China has built the “base layer” for the 21st century.The statistics are staggering. China’s power grid capacity has expanded since 2021 by an amount surpassing the entire existing US grid.