AI Hardware Industry News
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title: “Tesla Optimus Giga Texas 10M-Unit Factory: Musk kills the Model S line to build humanoids” Tesla’s Q1 call on April 22 turned into a factory-conversion announcement. Elon confirmed a 5.2M sq ft addition to Gigafactory Texas, $500M–$1B of capex, and a stated target of 10 million Optimus units per year. The Model S/X line… Continue reading
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Ericsson takes delivery of the first humanoid with Realbotix Vinci AI Vision System
On April 8, 2026, Realbotix shipped its first Vinci-equipped robot to Ericsson. Vinci is a patented vision module with micro cameras hidden inside the robot’s irises — not clipped on, not a headset, embedded in the eyeballs of its David, M-Series, and Aria humanoids. What the hardware actually does The in-eye cameras feed a vision… Continue reading
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Hesai EXT Color-Detecting Lidar: 4,320 channels, native color, and a 40% PDE Picasso chip
Hesai announced the EXT on April 18, ahead of the Beijing Auto Show. It’s the first automotive lidar that outputs 3D points with color baked in at the pixel level, in one scan. No more stitching lidar and camera frames downstream. What’s actually in the box The trick is the Picasso SPAD-SoC — Hesai calls… Continue reading
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Skild Brain × Fetch Robotics (via Zebra acquisition): $290M fleet, one foundation model, undisclosed price
Skild AI announced on April 15 that it bought Zebra Technologies’ entire robotics arm — which is the Fetch Robotics business Zebra paid $290M for back in 2021. The price this time wasn’t disclosed. What Skild actually got is a real, shipping AMR fleet: Freight for pallet and cart moves, Roller Top for conveyor hand-offs,… Continue reading
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title: “Siemens puts Humanoid HMND 01 Alpha on the Erlangen line — 60 totes/hour, 90% pick rate” A UK startup just walked a wheeled humanoid onto a real Siemens production floor and had it move boxes for eight hours straight. That’s the Hannover Messe headline this week, and robotics Twitter is treating it as the… Continue reading
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Mentra Live + MentraOS (open-source) hit GitHub: one TypeScript SDK, four pairs of glasses
Mentra open-sourced the whole stack in April 2026. Not just the SDK — the entire OS, MIT licensed, sitting on GitHub at Mentra-Community/MentraOS. $299 gets you a 43g pair of camera glasses running a MediaTek MTK8766, with a 12MP camera at 119° FOV, three mics, stereo speakers, 10+ hours of mixed use, and 40+ minutes… Continue reading
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Alibaba Amap Embodied Quadruped + ABot-World: Alibaba’s first robot just beat Google and NVIDIA on the leaderboard
Alibaba’s map app is now shipping robots. Amap, the division most people know as China’s Google Maps, is debuting its first embodied robot at the 2026 Beijing E-Town Half Marathon. Alibaba’s first real piece of hardware, and it’s a dog. The brain is more interesting than the body. Amap spun up an embodied intelligence division… Continue reading
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