Growth Dragons Weekly: China Beats Nvidia in Robots, a Miner and PCB Maker IPO, Brokers Consolidate, and a Chery's Bold Move in Japan
What happened in China this week:
China Companies Beat Nvidia in New Global Robotics Ranking
After Victory Giant’s 75% IPO Gains, Competitor WUS Printed Circuit Listing in HK
Silvercorp: Low-Cost, High-Profit Metals Miner Goes for HK IPO
Soochow Securities To Buy Donghai Securities, Responding to the Call of Building Bigger Brokerages
Chery Dares To Sell Its Cars in Japan. Will the Japanese Buy?
#1 China Companies Beat Nvidia in New Global Robotics Ranking
Here’s something that would have sounded like a stretch just two years ago. Chinese AI startups are now outperforming Nvidia on some of the most respected robotics benchmarks in the world.
Spirit AI’s Spirit v1.6 recently topped the RoboArena global leaderboard, beating Nvidia’s Cosmos 3 model in robotic decision-making and real-world action capabilities. And it’s not just Spirit AI. Manifold AI, AgiBot, and DexForce now lead global rankings in world modelling, robotic perception, and training-data generation. The entire embodied AI stack. China’s doing it across the board.
It’s happening faster than most people expected.
The Secret Weapon Is Data
What’s driving this? Capital, yes. Talent, sure. But the real edge is data, and that’s where China has a structural advantage that’s hard to replicate.
Jensen Huang himself has said that data is the biggest bottleneck in robotics. China has exactly that. A manufacturing ecosystem with massive real-world deployment environments that generates data at a scale few countries can match. More robots lead to more data, which leads to better models, which leads to even more robots. It’s a flywheel, and it’s spinning fast.
Startups like Spirit AI, XYZ Embodied AI, and Manifold AI have collectively raised billions of yuan in just months. Local governments are building state-backed robotics data factories. This isn’t just venture capital enthusiasm. It’s industrial policy at scale.
What This Means for Investors
The assumption that the US will simply dominate because it has Nvidia is getting harder to defend.
Does this mean you should dump Nvidia? No. Jensen’s not going anywhere, and the US still leads in many parts of the stack. But the narrative that Chinese AI is just copying and catching up is outdated. In robotics, at least, they’re already ahead on some measures.
Just because China is winning in robotics doesn’t mean Chinese robot companies are the best investment. Quite the opposite, actually. Think about how the AI boom has played out. It’s not the AI software companies raking in the profits. It’s the pick and shovel plays, the suppliers and infrastructure providers, the CAPEX beneficiaries. Robotics is shaping up the same way. The companies supplying the components, sensors, and training infrastructure to robot makers are likely where the real money is being made. We’ve covered one example here.
