XPENG’s IRON Comes Alive

When the curtain lifted at XPENG’s 2025 AI Day in Guangzhou, China, a figure strode across the stage with such supple grace that the internet briefly refused to believe it was a robot. The company’s founder He Xiaopeng had to slice through the machine’s synthetic “skin” to prove that no human performer was hiding inside.

IRON, the machine in question, marks XPENG’s leap from cars to “physical AI”. It boasts 82 degrees of freedom across its body, 22 in each hand, and the company claims it is the first humanoid to run on an all-solidstate battery—lighter, denser, and safer for working alongside people. Its mind is built on three in-house Turing chips delivering roughly 2,250 TOPS (tera operational per second) of compute, and a control system derived from the firm’s vision-language architecture that powers its autonomous vehicles. Bain & Company calls humanoid robotics “early-stage and heavily supervised”, but the numbers are stirring. The Bank of America expects some 18,000 units to ship in 2025, and Goldman Sachs estimates a $38-billion market by 2035 if costs and reliability improve.

For IRON, the real test will be whether its apparent grace can survive the messiness of real life—factories, hospitals, elder care—where the future of work is already quietly rehearsing its first steps.

Google’S Next Leap

Nano Banana 2, the imagegenerator from Google, may arrive soon powered by its upcoming LLM version, Gemini 3.0 Pro. According to reports, Nano Banana 2 will support native 4K output and introduce a multi-step generation process that plans, reviews and refines visuals before finalising them. Additional features include expanded aspect-ratio support and improved text and graphic rendering for designers.

AI Boom Jitters

SoftBank Group’s decision to offload roughly $5.8 billion worth of Nvidia shares has triggered worries that the AI investment boom may be cresting. The tech conglomerate explained the funds will fuel a broad AI push, including an ambitious $500-billion “Stargate” infrastructure plan and large stakes in OpenAI. Analysts caution that the timing may signal that even major backers see the risk of an AI equity bubble.

iPhone Sales

Apple has hit a major milestone in India, shipping a record 5 million iPhones between July and September 2025, its best quarter ever in the country. The iPhone 16 led the surge, emerging as India’s most-shipped smartphone of the period, helping Apple climb to the fourth spot among all brands. Analysts say the firm’s 25 per cent year-on-year growth reflects India’s growing appetite for premium devices.