China’s Spring Festival Gala, the country’s pre-eminent televised New Year event, has become an unlikely but high-stakes showcase for domestic robotics firms. In late January three leading embodied-AI companies—Yush Technology, Galaxy General and Magic Atom—announced formal partnerships with the 2026 gala, turning the programme’s tech segment into a public contest over narrative and national prestige.
Yush Technology confirmed on January 26 that it will be a robot partner for the CCTV 2026 Spring Festival Gala, marking the firm’s third appearance at the broadcast. That followed Galaxy General’s announcement on January 25 that it had been named the gala’s designated embodied large-model robot, and Magic Atom’s strategic-partnership declaration on January 23. Each move signals a deliberate effort by robot makers to use the Gala’s enormous domestic and diaspora audience as both marketing stage and credibility stamp.
The Gala has not always been a robotics platform. Tech appearances were long dominated by internet giants such as Tencent and Alibaba after 2015, while robots first slipped into the variety-show format as early as 2005. But humanoid machines have grown ever more prominent: Yush’s robot ox in 2021 and the H1 humanoid’s headline-making “YangBOT” performance at the 2024 Gala are recent examples of how a few minutes on the national stage can turn an engineering prototype into a viral cultural moment.
Behind the spectacle lies intense commercial pressure. Yush, Galaxy General and Magic Atom are not merely courting viewers; they are courting investors, IPO windows and commercial contracts. Yush disclosed a multi-hundred-million-yuan C round in June 2025 valuing the company at over RMB 12 billion and has been under IPO guidance with CITIC Securities. Galaxy General completed successive large financings through 2025, including an RMB 1.1 billion round and a later financing exceeding $300 million. Magic Atom, spun out of Dreame, has rapidly expanded overseas and completed strategic financing in 2025.
The market dynamics are striking. IDC estimates global humanoid shipments hit roughly 18,000 units in 2025, up more than 500% year-on-year, with Chinese firms dominant and a growing split between research/consumer uses and industrial deployments. Full-size humanoids command a disproportionate share of industry revenue, and companies are racing to prove both technological readiness and commercial utility across entertainment, education, logistics and medical scenarios.
For the Gala’s producers, selecting robot partners is both programming and statecraft. A holographic demonstration of China’s progress in embodied AI reaches billions on a single night and helps frame narratives about industrial upgrading and technological sovereignty. Analysts have linked such public validation to a broader moment for the industry: heavy private investment, the arrival of robot-oriented large models abroad, and clearer timelines for mass-market rollouts such as those signposted by overseas players.
Not every leading firm has opted in. UBTECH said it will not participate, citing a focus on real-world deployments and R&D. Several other domestic humanoid firms either declined to comment or said they had no current plans to appear. That divergence suggests two competing logics inside the sector: chase mass visibility via cultural spectacle, or concentrate on steady commercialization and niche deployments.
The Spring Festival Gala’s stage will therefore be a revealing one. It will test whether a few minutes of prime-time exposure can translate into sustainable commercial advantage, lift public trust in embodied AI, and accelerate adoption in service and industrial settings—or whether the publicity merely amplifies proof-of-concept demos while the harder business of scaling and integration remains the bottleneck.