XPENG IRON

XPENG IRON is a full-size humanoid robot developed by XPENG Robotics, the robotics arm of the Chinese electric-vehicle maker XPeng. The company’s pitch rests less on the robot’s specification sheet than on where it intends to build it: XPeng already runs high-volume vehicle production lines and an in-house silicon programme, and it plans to use both for humanoids.

IRON carries 76 degrees of freedom across the body and 21 in each hand, and runs three of XPeng’s own Turing AI chips for a combined 2,250 TOPS of on-device processing. The outer shell is a synthetic skin over what XPeng calls a fully enclosed flexible lattice structure — a design choice aimed at making the robot safer to work beside and less mechanical to look at. The robot’s fluid walking gait at the November 2025 AI Day event drew enough attention that XPeng publicly addressed speculation that a person was inside the suit.

In August 2026 XPENG Robotics raised over $900m at a $6.3bn valuation, in a round led by IDG Capital with participation from Tencent, Alibaba and Gaorong Ventures. Roughly $600m came from outside investors, with the balance from an XPeng subsidiary and from company leadership; XPeng retained about 82% of the spun-out unit. The company has said it aims to begin mass production by the end of 2026, initially for use inside its own facilities, with customer deliveries in China and international markets planned for 2027.

The plan moved forward in September 2026, when XPENG opened an automated humanoid production line in Guangzhou and a finished IRON walked off it under its own power. The company says more than 80% of core production steps are automated. In October, CEO He Xiaopeng set out the next steps: deliveries from the first half of 2027, starting in commercial settings such as stores and shopping malls, then a wider international rollout in the second half of 2027. Industrial and household uses are planned after that. XPENG says IRON can hold conversations in several languages and remember faces and past conversations.

Those targets should be read as intentions rather than achievements. No price has been published, IRON is not available to order, and the stated capacity goals — more than 1,000 units a month, and one million units by 2030 — are company projections that no independent party has verified.