Dec 13, 2024

December 13, 2024 Huawei has made several moves recently that indicate robotics becoming a bigger priority for the company. | Source: Adobe Stock Huawei Technologies, a Shenzhen-based telecommunications provider, last week invested 3 billion yuan (about $413 million) into its subsidiary Dongguan Jimu Machinery. The South China Morning Post first reported this story. Huawei has not publicly disclosed the investment. Huawei established Jimu in June 2023, when it registered the company with 870 million yuan in financing (about $121 million), according to Huawei Central . Huawei said Jimu’s business scope includes electronic component manufacturing, engineering and technical research, the import and export of goods including technology, experimental development, and more. Jimu is led by Li Jianguo, an executive director at Huawei, and the president of its manufacturing department, according to the South China Morning Post. Huawei last month an embodied AI center in Shenzhen. The center, it said, will focus on integrating AI into physical entities, including robots. The Huawei Global Embodied AI Industry Innovation Center will build what Huawei calls key foundational technologies, involving areas like embodied AI models and computing power. The center has also partnered with Shenzhen-based robotics companies like Leju Robot and Han’s Robot . Huawei’s robotic interests, however, can be traced back to 2022, when it partnered with Dataa Robotics. Under the partnership, the companies worked together to develop multimodal large language models and new robotics applications. Later, in March 2024, Leju Robot released robot products powered by Huawei’s LLM Pangu. China’s robotics industry Robot density in the manufacturing industry in 2023, according to the IFR. | Source: IFR It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of China’s largest technology companies is investing more in robotics. China has made growing its robotics industry a priority in recent years. According to the International Federation of Robotics ( IFR ),  China is by far the largest robotics market . The IFR said the 276,288 industrial robots installed in China in 2023 represent 51% of all global robotics installations. China also has a robot density of 470 robot’s per 10,000 employees, the IFR said, the third-highest robot density in the world  behind only the Republic of Korea and Singapore.