XPeng Plans to Sell Its IRON Humanoid Robot Globally Starting Next Year

There’s been a lot of talk about humanoid robots the last two years — Tesla’s Optimus, Figure, Boston Dynamics — but one of the biggest EV makers in China is now making its move. XPeng plans to launch its IRON humanoid robot worldwide next year, according to sources who spoke with the Wall Street Journal.

The company is pushing hard on production. The target is to hit over 1,000 units per month by the end of 2026, laying the groundwork for a global rollout in 2027. That’s an aggressive ramp for a product category that most manufacturers are still prototyping.

The first real-world deployment? XPeng’s own stores. In the first quarter of 2027, IRON robots will start working as shopping guides inside XPeng’s direct-sales locations in China. Later that year, the same service will expand to overseas showrooms. It’s a smart starting point — controlled environments, brand-aligned use cases, and real customer interaction data to feed back into development.

XPeng first showed off the IRON robot in November 2025, billing it as “the most human-like humanoid robot.” In February 2026, the company signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Guangzhou Tianhe district government to build a full-chain mass production base for humanoid robots at the Guangtang Science and Innovation City, a dedicated embodied intelligence industrial park.

XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call in late May that the production version of the next-generation IRON robot is progressing well on both hardware and software. It’s about to enter the ET2 phase — hardware-software integration — and is scheduled for a formal unveiling in the third quarter of this year. The goal is high-level humanoid robot mass production by the end of 2026.

He was blunt about what this means financially: starting next year, hardware revenue and AI model revenue from humanoid robots will be one of the key growth drivers for XPeng’s top and bottom lines. That’s not a side project — that’s a core business line.

The humanoid robot race is heating up. Tesla has been showing Optimus in various stages of capability, Figure recently raised a massive round, and now XPeng is signaling it intends to be a volume player, not just a showcase. Whether 1,000 units a month is realistic for a product category that barely exists yet is another question — but XPeng has a track record of aggressive timelines in EVs, and it’s betting the same supply chain discipline can translate to robotics.