China’s data regulator plans standards for embodied AI, ten days after industry asked
China’s National Data Administration said it will develop standards for embodied AI data and guide local authorities on the work, ten days after seven companies asked it for exactly that. Europe regulates who may reach the data a machine generates but has no programme producing it, and the data labs promised in its Data Union […] This story continues at The Next Web
China’s National Data Administration said it will develop standards for embodied AI data and guide local authorities on the work, ten days after seven companies asked it for exactly that. Europe regulates who may reach the data a machine generates but has no programme producing it, and the data labs promised in its Data Union Strategy have not been set up.
China’s data regulator will write standards for the data that trains robots, Bloomberg reported . The National Data Administration said it will guide local authorities on the work and support companies putting more money into data resources.
The statement followed a meeting on 10 September chaired by Liu Liehong, who heads the agency. Research institutes, technology companies and humanoid robotics organisations attended, and the agency said the industry is becoming more data-driven.
The industry asked for it first. Ten days earlier the same agency met seven companies which requested public data infrastructure for embodied AI and common data standards, MLex reported .
The constraint in humanoid robotics is no longer the model. It is hours of recorded reality.
Embodied AI foundation models need roughly 10 million hours of real training data, by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s estimate. Somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million hours of high quality data exist worldwide.
More than 70 embodied AI training grounds are already operating, spread across over half of China’s provincial regions, with 46 more planned or under construction, TechNode reported . About 86% of them are aimed at industrial manufacturing.
The three clusters are the Yangtze River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the Pearl River Delta.
Europe has written the rules for this data without collecting much of it. The Data Act has applied since 12 September 2025 and governs who may reach the data a connected product generates, industrial machinery included.
It also stops that data being used to build a competing product. Design obligations bite on connected products placed on the EU market after 12 September 2026.
The nearest European equivalent to a Chinese training ground is a company. NEURA Robotics is building gyms , ten planned and five meant to be running by the end of this year, split between Europe, the United States and China.
The Commission published a Data Union Strategy on 19 November 2025 whose first priority is scaling up access to data for AI. Ten months on, most of those actions have not been carried out, including the data labs.
None of which hands China the market. Only 23% of Chinese enterprises surveyed this year were satisfied with the robots on offer, and a training ground collects hours rather than paying customers .
