New Delhi, July 19 -- SHANGHAI - The exhibition hall at Shanghai's World Expo Convention Center was arranged like a display case for manufacturing ambition. More than 30 humanoid robots stood in curated rows at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference this week, from industrial units the size of a linebacker to slender machines with multi-jointed hands that engineers said could pick up an egg without cracking it.

AgiBot, the Shanghai-based robotics firm backed by state investors and venture capital, used the annual gathering to present production numbers that redraw the map of global competition in embodied AI. China manufactured 40,000 humanoid robots in the first six months of 2026, matching the country's entire 2025 output, accord...