Tiangong Ultra Smashes Usain Bolt's 100m Record at World Humanoid Robot Games

Tiangong Ultra, built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, ran the 100 meters in 9.39 seconds in a preliminary heat at the second World Humanoid Robot Games on August 23, beating Usain Bolt's 9.58-second human world record set in 2009. The Honor-developed Lightning robot finished second in 9.47 seconds, according to The Verge and Xinhua, and Tiangong Ultra also won the 400 meters in 38.16 seconds, breaking Wayde van Niekerk's 43.03-second world record. The Games, running through this week at Beijing's 'Ice Ribbon' venue, drew 2,056 robots from 16 countries.

Why They Can't Stop

Unlike human athletes, the sprinting humanoid robots cannot reliably brake at top speed. Unitree's top model reached 28.3 mph in another heat but failed to decelerate, veered off the track, and crashed into a trackside crash pad, according to TechRadar. Several other sprinters met similar ends, with the bits of the robots collected and carried off on stretchers. The 100-meter performance is the most striking showcase of what the category has achieved in twelve months — last year's Games, also held at the Ice Ribbon, featured wobbly robots and embarrassed gaps between first and second place, according to CGTN.

Unitree Goes Public

The Games opened the same week Unitree Robotics became the first humanoid robot maker to list on China's A-share market, debuting on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market on August 19 at 1,100 yuan per share, a 629% premium. The shares have pulled back significantly but remain at a high level. Unitree shipped over 5,500 humanoid units in 2025, more than any other company, generating revenue of nearly 1.7 billion yuan, and its H1 2026 revenue rose 48.5% year on year to about 1.15 billion yuan. The IPO marks a watershed moment for China's humanoid robot industry, Xinhua said, with 46 robotics-related companies now queuing for Hong Kong Stock Exchange listings.

From Sprinting to Work

The 51-event Games include 30 sports competitions and 21 work scenarios. The work tests, which Huawei said are more than 40% full autonomy, include cable connection, warehouse operations, pharmacy sorting, and restaurant service. Beijing Galbot showed pharmacy-sorting robots deployed in nearly 100 stores across more than 10 cities. Booster Robotics' Booster T2 robot can kick balls at over 100 km/h in the robot football tournament, and its end-side computing power is 10x the previous generation, with system latency dropping from 10 ms to 4 ms. Global humanoid shipments reached approximately 19,100 units in H1 2026, with China accounting for over 97% of the total.

What to Watch Through Year-End

Three checkpoints follow. Booster's CS-4 accelerator and Cerebras' next-generation systems are both expected to ship in late 2026, both targeting the heterogeneous GPU-plus-accelerator configurations Nvidia has built with its Vera Rubin and Groq 3 LPX racks. The remaining IPOs from the 46 robotics companies queueing for Hong Kong listings will determine whether Unitree's 629% premium becomes the template or an outlier. The Xiong Youjun-led consensus from the Games — that the industry is on 'the eve of the ChatGPT moment' regarding embodied intelligence — will be tested against the first commercial-scale humanoid deployments at logistics and manufacturing customers in Q4 2026.