XPENG IRON Timeline

At a company event on 12 October, chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng said IRON deliveries would start in the first half of 2027, with a wider international rollout in the second half of 2027. First uses are commercial settings such as stores and shopping malls, with industrial and household applications to follow. XPENG said the robot can converse in several languages, with face recognition and conversation memory.

XPENG commissioned what it calls the world’s first automated production line for advanced humanoid robots in Guangzhou, and a finished IRON walked off the line under its own power. The company says more than 80% of core production processes are automated, drawing on its electric-vehicle manufacturing experience. The production version keeps 76 body degrees of freedom, 21 per hand and three Turing chips (2,250 TOPS), with its physical AI model running on the robot rather than by remote control.

A round led by IDG Capital, with Tencent, Alibaba and Gaorong Ventures participating, values the newly spun-out robotics subsidiary at $6.3bn. Around $600m comes from external investors, $200m from an XPeng subsidiary and $100m from company leadership. XPeng keeps roughly 82% of the unit.

XPeng states it intends to begin mass production of IRON before the end of 2026, initially deploying units inside its own facilities, with customer deliveries in China and international markets planned for 2027.

XPeng demonstrates IRON with a notably fluid, human-like gait. The demonstration circulates widely and prompts enough speculation about a person in a costume that the company responds publicly. The reveal version is presented with a biomimetic spine and muscle system, fully flexible skin, 22-degree-of-freedom hands, a curved 3D face display, a solid-state battery and three in-house Turing chips totalling 2,250 TOPS. (The production version announced in September 2026 lists 21 degrees of freedom per hand.)