When the CEO of a publicly traded company decides to personally run a new business unit, it tells you one of two things: either the division is in trouble, or it’s the future of the company. In Xpeng’s case, it appears to be the latter.
He Xiaopeng, chairman and CEO of Chinese EV maker Xpeng (NYSE: XPEV), assumed direct leadership of the company’s robotics business unit on June 10, 2026. The goal: get the company’s IRON humanoid robots into mass production by Q4 of this year, with customer deliveries kicking off in 2027.
From electric cars to humanoid robots
Xpeng has been building toward this moment for a while. Back in February 2026, the company broke ground on a dedicated robotics production facility spanning roughly 110,000 square meters in Guangzhou’s Tianhe District. That’s about 1.2 million square feet, roughly the size of 20 football fields, purpose-built for assembling humanoid robots at scale.
The robotics team itself has grown past 1,000 members. The IRON robots feature approximately 200 degrees of freedom, which in robotics terms means 200 independent axes of movement. For context, the human body has around 244 degrees of freedom.
