ACE Robotics Predicts 2027 'ChatGPT Moment' for Embodied AI; Data Bottleneck Remains Key Challenge

Huo Xing Finance reports that on August 23, Wang Xiaogang, Chairman of ACE Robotics, a Chinese embodied AI startup, told Reuters: “We expect that by the end of next year, embodied AI will reach its ChatGPT moment, driven by world models and environmental data capture.” ACE Robotics, backed by Ant Group and SenseTime, raised over $100 million in funding in the first half of 2026 and plans to initiate an IPO “as soon as possible once regulatory approval is granted.” Wang believes that current robots still struggle to reliably perform diverse tasks in unfamiliar environments, with the primary constraint not being algorithms but a severe shortage of training data. “Over the past few years, the entire industry has accumulated only about 100,000 hours of data—far too little to train foundational embodied models.” ACE Robotics plans to collect tens of millions of hours of real-world environmental data within two years and deploy its technology in 1,000 stores within the next year. On the broader robotics front, Boston Dynamics released its commercial Atlas model in January, claiming AI has brought it closer to commercial deployment; Alibaba launched the Qwen-Robot Suite in June; and researchers are experimenting with data collection methods such as the HumanoidExo exoskeleton. Competition in embodied AI is shifting from hardware prototypes to a dual race for data scale and model capability.