- New facility aims to bridge the gap between robot prototypes and large-scale commercial deployment
- Huawei and Alibaba DAMO Academy to help build shared infrastructure for embodied intelligence
Hangzhou has launched China’s first national-level pilot testing base dedicated to embodied artificial intelligence, as the city steps up efforts to become the country’s leading hub for AI innovation and robotics commercialization.
The National Pilot Base for Embodied Intelligence Applications was unveiled on May 16 in Hangzhou’s Binjiang district. The facility, located within the Smart Manufacturing Valley Industrial Complex, will provide shared computing power, datasets, AI models and real-world testing environments for robotics companies developing embodied AI systems.
Pilot testing, or “middle-stage testing,” refers to the phase between laboratory research and full-scale manufacturing, where products are validated under simulated real-world production conditions to reduce technical and commercial risks before mass deployment.
The launch comes as embodied AI startups face mounting bottlenecks around fragmented computing resources, limited access to training data and a lack of standardized testing environments.
Many companies remain stuck between prototype development and commercial rollout — a stage often described as the industry’s “valley of death.”
“The national pilot base is meant to be the connector that links computing power, data, models and application scenarios into a complete industrial chain,” said Li Xingteng, deputy general manager of the company operating the facility. “Companies should no longer have to build everything from scratch. They can enter the ecosystem directly.”
The platform aims to provide startups with lower-cost access to domestic computing infrastructure, AI models and testing resources while shortening development cycles.
Chingmu, a Shanghai-based company specializing in optical motion capture and multimodal data collection, has already begun testing at the site.
“In the past, collecting robotic hand motion data meant finding our own computing resources, testing scenarios and datasets, which was expensive and time-consuming,” said Zhang Haiwei, a company executive. “Now the base offers one-stop services ranging from chip adaptation to model testing and scenario validation, significantly accelerating the process from R&D to deployment.”
Alongside the launch, Hangzhou also announced plans to establish an embodied AI foundation model laboratory focused on perception, autonomous decision-making, motion control, human-machine collaboration and self-learning systems.
The lab will build a general-purpose embodied AI algorithm platform and testing framework aimed at supporting commercialization.
China’s major AI players are also joining the initiative. Huawei will partner with the base to establish a joint innovation center integrating resources from Huawei’s 2012 Laboratories, HiSilicon and Huawei Cloud to accelerate deployment of embodied AI systems across manufacturing, logistics and engineering applications.
Meanwhile, Alibaba DAMO Academy will help build an innovation accelerator focused on foundational AI technologies, developer ecosystems and demonstration projects designed to speed the transition of embodied AI research into commercial products.
