Unitree Calls 2028 the Year; Tesla Pushes Optimus to Late 2027
Founder resets expectations after valuation correction as Tesla locks Samsung substrate supply but admits hands remain unsolved.
Unitree's founder now pegs the humanoid breakthrough for 2028, per Bloomberg, a notable push from prior noise after Digitimes called out the Chinese robotics darling for a valuation correction. The timing matters: Tesla simultaneously delayed Optimus customer deliveries to late 2027 and admitted hands are still a problem, according to Electrek. The gap between demo reels and deployment timelines just widened by 18 months.
Meanwhile Tesla locked five years of substrate supply by bankrolling $830 million of Samsung's plant build, Wccftech reports. Texas Instruments got name-checked by 24/7 Wall St. for chip exposure to every Optimus unit—whenever those actually ship. Tesla also booked $786 million in tariff refunds and plowed it back into U.S. operations, per Shattered.io. The capex is real. The hands are not.
China's Kung Fu robot kicked car doors and fought off a knife attacker in a video making rounds, but no word on when it ships or who built it. Vietnam's YYForce launched Workforce OS on Nvidia silicon, calling it a robotics platform. Chinese tech giants are buying Nvidia gaming chips—GeForce cards—to sidestep export controls for AI workloads, Reuters confirmed. Chinese chipmakers countered with new RISC-V server CPUs aimed at AI demand, per Global Times.
The broader AI capex cycle is showing stress fractures. The Nasdaq dropped more than 750 points as investors questioned whether massive spending will pay off, CBS News reported. Meta guided capex to $145 billion and shares got obliterated, according to TradingView and Analytics India Magazine. Amazon is now spending more cash than it earns, AOL noted, creating fresh portfolio risk. One scenario floated by BigGo Finance: if AI capex slams the brakes, the S&P 500 plunges 30 percent and wipes $20 trillion in market value.
CoreWeave bounced back operationally but its bonds still yield 15 percent, The Tech Buzz observed. U.S. banks signaled confidence in AI capex sustainability through lending commitments, KBW said, but the CCIA warned that applying semiconductor and server tariffs to data centers would cost the country $180 billion a year. Microsoft earnings are expected to focus on AI momentum and capex next week, per Investor's Business Daily.
Dan Ives says Palantir and Snowflake are nearing the end of the gap between AI capex and true monetization, Benzinga reported. Aswath Damodaran weighed in on the capex boom in a piece picked up by Roger Montgomery. Oracle and Alibaba are being compared for cloud edge, Yahoo Finance Canada notes, while India's emerging sectors are driving capex and credit demand toward storage and semiconductors, the Economic Times said.
The humanoid narrative is bifurcating: Tesla and Unitree are pushing timelines out while locking supply chains in. The AI infrastructure bet is live—CoreWeave bonds, Meta capex, Amazon burn—but the monetization proof is still pending. Hands remain hard. The market is no longer willing to wait on faith alone.