BEIJING — A popular new programmable personal robot from a French-American company is powered by a chip from Shanghai-listed Rockchip which in turn uses British company ARM's tech, reflecting how intertwined global tech supply chains remain.
The colorful "Microduck" robot from Hugging Face's French subsidiary Pollen Robotics has sold more than 10,000 units since its launch on Thursday, with sales surpassing $5 million as of late Tuesday, according to Hugging Face.
That level of demand for the robot has quickly delayed delivery times for new orders past the initial promise of Christmas 2026.
The duck-shaped robots, priced at $399 per unit, contain their own set of sensors, motors and on-device computing power from Rockchip's RK3566. The chip incorporates technology licensed from British semiconductor company ARM, according to Rockchip.
The Chinese company is a "key vendor" for AI that operates on devices, rather than in the cloud, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. He noted the company's chips are commonly used for machine vision involving object detection and image recognition.
"While it has massive footprint, the company chips are not designed for complex edge AI devices as they lack the compute resources," Su said. Such computing capabilities can allow smartphones, robots and other electronic devices to run generative AI tools securely without sharing data on the internet.
Rockchip last month reported a 40% year-on-year increase in operating revenue in the first half of the year to 2.88 billion yuan ($428 million), while net profit excluding one-time items surged by more than 60%.
The 1.76 pound (800g) Microduck is both an interactive consumer toy and a development platform. Using open-source software, it can supposedly learn from virtual simulations and goal-driven directions.
The product is the second robot from France-based startup Pollen Robotics, which was acquired by Hugging Face last year. The first robot by Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics, launched last spring, sold more than 10,000 units, Pollen Robotics said.
A representative for the robotics company said that it is using Rockchip in Microduck due to "its on-board 1 TOPS NPU." TOPS, or tera operations per second, is a measure of AI computing performance. Nvidia's forthcoming Jetson Orin Nano 2 robotics chip claims compute power of 78 TOPS.
Just before Microduck's release, The Information reported that Nvidia had agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Neither company responded to a request for comment.
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said in a social media post Monday that people were starting to monitor the Microduck supply chain, as the company sees a strong rush for orders.
Other companies are rolling out similar personal robots at premium-end consumer prices.
Startup Zeroth this summer launched a child-sized humanoid robot for 8,888 yuan that claims to offer similar virtual simulation learning capabilities. It lists 247 pre-orders on JD.com in China. The company plans to reveal its open source robotics system on Wednesday.
Meanwhile a Wall-E-type cameraman robot from Mondo Robotics has raised more than 80 times its initial goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter ahead of the Sept. 6 deadline. Early bird prices for the device, which resembles a GoPro on wheels, start at $549, with shipping scheduled to begin in October.
—CNBC's April Roach and Kai Nicol-Schwarz contributed to this report.