As artificial intelligence steps out of the digital realm and into the real world, the race to build the embodied “brains” powering next-generation robots has become the newest battleground in tech competition between China and the United States.

Two days after US chip giant Nvidia launched its Cosmos 3 model – designed to help physical AI “think before it acts” – a Chinese start-up stole the spotlight.

On Wednesday, Hangzhou, Zhejiang province-based Spirit AI said its foundation model for embodied intelligence, Spirit v1.6, had become the first from China to top the RoboArena global leaderboard.

Spirit v1.6 scored 1,924 on the benchmark, edging out Nvidia’s Cosmos3-Nano-Policy, which took second place with a score of 1,881. Coming in third was DreamZero with a score of 1,763 – another Nvidia project unveiled in February.

The RoboArena benchmark, which evaluates how effectively generalist robot policies translate to real-world actions, was co-developed by Nvidia alongside elite institutions including Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley.

The fierce competition underscores a broader shift: robotics is officially AI’s next frontier. Nvidia’s partnerships with China’s Unitree Robotics and Singaporean robotic hand pioneer Sharpa announced on Monday also highlight this trend.