Tesla Rival Xpeng Expands Robotics Bet With Guangzhou Factory For Optimus Challenger IRON

Xpeng Inc. (NYSE:XPEV) is set to break ground on its new humanoid robot factory in China as robotics takes center stage in the global tech industry.

End Of 2026 Production Goal

The company will begin work on its 1.18 million sq. ft. facility in Guangzhou, China, in the first quarter this year and is targeting large-scale production of its IRON humanoid robot by the end of the year, CnEVPost reported on Wednesday.

The move comes as Xpeng plans to address insufficient training data and production headwinds related to hardware and software supply chains, the report says.

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The facility will cover R&D, trial production, and large-scale manufacturing. The robot, which will incorporate the company’s Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architecture, weighs about 171 lbs and stands at 5 feet 10 inches.

Iron Vs Optimus

The IRON robot is touted to be a rival for Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Optimus Humanoid Robot. Xpeng aims to have produced over 1 million units of the robot by the end of the decade and has touted deploying the robot in tour guiding, retail services and more.

Meanwhile, Musk has been bullish on Optimus, going as far as to say that the robot would become the first-ever von Neumann probe and would help humanity colonize other planets in Space.

For reference, a von Neumann probe is a theoretical machine that is capable of creating copies of itself by using a planet’s resources and then sending those copies out to other planets.

The billionaire has also claimed that the robot could affect a country’s GDP as Tesla shifts its focus towards creating Optimus units by sunsetting the Model S and Model X production.

Musk had earlier shared plans to create an Optimus Academy to train the robot by using Tesla’s reality generator, which helps in the training of the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology. However, in the billionaire CEO’s own words, China remains a big competitive threat to Tesla’s robotics ambitions.