Shanghai Wants 8,000 Humanoid Robots in Factories by 2028

Shanghai wants 8,000 humanoid robots deployed in factories by 2028, placing a concrete adoption target alongside its broader push to modernize manufacturing with AI. The goal appears in a Jiefang Daily report republished by the Shanghai government.

Key Takeaways

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• Shanghai’s new intelligent-manufacturing initiative targets 8,000 humanoid robots entering factories by 2028.
• The wider program includes 500 advanced-level smart factories and more than 2,000 AI manufacturing application scenarios.
• The figure is a deployment goal; the announcement does not establish purchase orders or completed installations.

The initiative launched on October 12 at the opening of the 26th China International Industry Fair. Shanghai’s Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization confirms the launch in its official account of the event, describing a push to bring AI models into workshops and production lines.

A factory-adoption target

The Paper’s opening-day report, citing the event’s organizing committee, describes four major programs and 19 priority tasks covering manufacturing technology, AI integration, factory development and the supporting industrial ecosystem.

The reports reviewed do not identify suppliers, a procurement budget or an existing deployment baseline. They also do not specify how pilot installations will be counted or what operating requirements robots must meet to qualify.

Part of a wider manufacturing push

Economic Information Daily reports that the 2028 plan also calls for 10 industrial domain-specific AI models and 300 high-level AI agents. Shanghai aims to reach an industrial-robot density of 600 per 10,000 workers; that is a separate measure covering industrial robots generally.

The distinction between making robots and putting them to work matters. Shanghai-based AGIBOT recently announced cumulative production of 20,000 robots across its A, X and G series.

A concrete factory-use example is AGIBOT’s work at Longcheer Technology’s Nanchang plant. We previously covered its six-day livestream of robots working in tablet quality inspection alongside human operators. The site illustrates the type of industrial application at issue, though it is outside Shanghai and should not be counted toward the city’s target.