Alibaba and Tencent Lead China's Pivot From Chatbots to Embodied AI

China's biggest technology companies are shifting the center of their AI strategies from chatbots to machines that move. Alibaba and Tencent are leading a pivot toward embodied AI — putting large models into robots, vehicles and devices — in what the South China Morning Post describes as the next front in the country's AI race.

OpenClaw Gets a Body

The most concrete milestone: startup JoyIn's Zeroth M1 humanoid has become the first mass-produced robot to integrate Tencent's OpenClaw AI agent framework, allowing large language models to interpret human speech and translate it directly into robotic movements. Users can send commands to the robot and control it remotely through Tencent Cloud tools, with pre-orders opening this month.

The M1, a desk-sized mini humanoid first shown at CES 2026, is aimed at home environments — a deliberate contrast to the industrial humanoids that have dominated China's robotics push so far.

Alibaba, for its part, has been building robot-specific models within its Qwen family and steering its cloud division toward physical AI workloads, betting that the same open-weight strategy that made Qwen a global developer favorite — more than 100,000 derivative models on Hugging Face — can be replicated in robotics.

Capex Follows the Bodies

The pivot is backed by real money. Tencent's chief strategy officer has pledged "a substantial increase" in 2026 capital expenditure, especially in the second half of the year as more China-designed AI chips become available. Chinese robotics startups, meanwhile, have raised some of the largest rounds in the country this year, and embodied AI firms like Galaxy Bot ranked among Asia's biggest fundraisers in the first quarter.

Why the Shift, and Why Now

The move reflects both saturation and strategy. China's consumer chatbot market has become a brutal subsidy war — ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen app and Tencent's Yuanbao have spent heavily on user acquisition for products that are hard to monetize, and new government rules restricting AI companion features take effect July 15. Hardware, by contrast, plays to China's strengths: the world's densest manufacturing supply chain, dominant battery and motor production, and a policy establishment that has designated embodied AI a national priority.

Analysts say the wager is that the next DeepSeek moment will not be a model at all, but a machine — and that when it comes, it will be built in Shenzhen.