AI Markets: Unitree IPO frenzy, SpaceX float explodes, AMD strikes back

Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree’s IPO is sending Shanghai order books into a frenzy, while SpaceX absorbs a giant share unlock without tanking. On the chip front, AMD is opening its checkbook to take on Nvidia, and local opposition is starting to weigh on the cost of AI data centers in the United States.

Unitree: the IPO rush confirms China’s humanoid robot fever

The Chinese humanoid robot maker has priced its Shanghai listing amid extraordinary institutional demand. DeepSeek quietly bought in just before the debut.

Key points:

  • Priced at 150.80 yuan (~$22.3) per share, targeting a raise of 6.1 billion yuan (~$904 million) and a post-IPO valuation of about 61 billion yuan (~$9 billion according to CNBC)
  • Subscription opened August 10, payment due August 12, listing expected around August 19 on Shanghai’s STAR Market
  • Institutional order book oversubscribed more than 2,700 times during the preliminary inquiry period
  • DeepSeek joins as a strategic investor (933,400 shares, 141 million yuan), alongside Tencent, PetroChina and China Southern Power Grid

Demand far beyond the usual appetite

An oversubscription ratio of 2,700 times means institutional investors offered to buy 2,700 times more shares than were initially available at this stage of the process. That’s a level rarely seen, even on a Chinese exchange used to overheated listings. Unitree is floating only 10% of its enlarged share capital (about 40.44 million shares), which mechanically shrinks the available float and amplifies relative demand. The timeline is tight: regulatory approval came on June 1, the price was set on August 6, subscription runs on the 10th, and the listing is expected around August 19. If it goes through, Unitree will become the first pure-play humanoid and quadruped robot company listed on a major global exchange, beating Figure AI (still private, valued at $39 billion) and Boston Dynamics (a SoftBank subsidiary, not separately listed).

DeepSeek’s presence in the strategic round is the most notable development at this stage: the Chinese AI lab behind the January 2025 market shock is taking a stake that is modest (141 million yuan, or about $20 million) but symbolic, at a time when Beijing is pushing its tech champions to back one another. Tencent, oil giant PetroChina and power utility China Southern Power Grid round out a list of nine strategic investors accounting for 20% of the total offering.

An IPO closed to European investors using a PEA

Like any stock listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market (a yuan-denominated market reserved mostly for Chinese investors and a few quotas for qualified foreign institutional investors), Unitree remains off-limits through a PEA and is even hard to hold in a regular brokerage account for a European retail investor. The simplest indirect exposure is through thematic UCITS robotics ETFs, such as KOID, which track a basket of sector stocks rather than betting on a single name. Still, Unitree’s revenue growth is slowing sharply (+35 to 45% in the first half of 2026 versus +332% a year earlier) and expected adjusted net income is declining, with R&D eating up a growing share of resources — a reminder that demand for the paper says nothing, on its own, about the company’s actual industrial trajectory.

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SpaceX: the big share unlock doesn’t sink the stock

Nearly a billion SpaceX shares became tradable on August 6. Contrary to the usual fear that a flood of supply drives prices down, the stock gained strength right afterward.

Key points:

  • 911.5 million shares unlocked on August 6, or about 143% of the initial IPO float (~639 million shares); the potentially tradable float thus climbs to ~1.55 billion shares
  • The share of capital actually available to the market rises from about 4.9% to 11.8%
  • The stock closed up 6.1% on August 6 despite the supply influx, then climbed to $133.11 on August 9 (+15.8% on the session)
  • The stock nonetheless remains about 34% below its June high and below its $135 IPO price; analyst price targets range from $62 to $800, with an average around $227-230

Why more supply didn’t push the price down

SpaceX went public in June with a deliberately tiny float (less than 5% of its capital), a choice that mechanically inflated the initial valuation but left the threat of a shock hanging over the first lockup expiry. That shock did come on August 6, but in the opposite direction from what some investors feared: the stock rose instead of falling. Analysts point to several combined explanations: a significant share of longtime shareholders (founders, executives, long-standing venture capital funds) chose not to sell right away, betting on a rebound after second-quarter results in early August; the stock had also slumped badly in the preceding weeks (down as much as 43% from its June peak), which may have drawn buyers looking for a lower entry point. High short interest (about 34% of the float at the end of July, representing $24.6 billion in short positions according to S3 Partners) may also have accelerated the move up, as short sellers bought back their positions in the face of the rebound.

The countdown to the next unlocks

This first unlock is just one step: according to the schedule given to investors, up to 40% of the capital could become tradable by December 8, while the remaining 60% — including Elon Musk’s stake — will stay locked up until mid-2027. Each new step will replay the same real-world test: share supply rises, but will demand keep up? For a European investor, SpaceX remains a Nasdaq stock ineligible for the PEA, which can only be held in a regular brokerage account or through a US equity/tech ETF in UCITS format, usually with a marginal weight in a single holding.

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AMD beefs up its anti-Nvidia offensive with the Taalas acquisition

AMD is buying a Toronto startup specializing in inference chips, just days after SpaceX confirmed its exclusive switch to Nvidia chips. A way of reminding everyone that there are still fronts where AMD is gaining ground.

Key points:

  • On August 6, AMD announced the acquisition of Taalas, a startup founded in 2023 that etches an AI model’s weights directly into silicon instead of relying on conventional HBM memory
  • Deal value not disclosed; Taalas had raised $219 million in venture capital; closing targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026
  • AMD’s third AI acquisition in two years, after Silo AI ($665 million, 2024) and ZT Systems ($4.9 billion)
  • Stated goal: integrate Taalas chips into Helios racks, alongside Instinct accelerators, to address an inference market AMD says is growing more than 80% a year

Why inference is becoming the new battlefield

Training an AI model and then running it for millions of users (“inference”) are two different jobs, with different chip requirements. Nvidia largely dominates the first segment and a good chunk of the second with its general-purpose GPUs, but inference at massive scale increasingly rewards specialized chips that are cheaper to run. That’s Taalas’s bet: etch a fixed model directly into the circuit instead of loading it on every request from HBM memory, a component that has become both scarce and expensive (see the memory price pressures already seen at Micron and SK Hynix). The logic echoes Nvidia’s own acquisition of Groq in late 2025 for about $20 billion: both camps are trying to lock in an alternative architecture for inference rather than betting everything on the general-purpose GPU. CEO Lisa Su summed up the company’s philosophy: “there’s no one-size-fits-all solution” when it comes to chips, while reaffirming that GPUs will keep the lion’s share of the AI market thanks to their flexibility.

AMD remains under pressure despite the flurry

The market welcomed the deal fairly favorably, with renewed optimism among retail investors, but without any runaway enthusiasm: AMD stock is still down about 6% over the last 30 trading sessions, despite solid quarterly results in early August. Analyst price targets remain widely scattered (from $465 at Morgan Stanley to $700 at other firms), a sign that the market hasn’t yet decided whether these acquisitions will be enough to close the gap with Nvidia. For a European investor, AMD (Nasdaq) remains outside the PEA, available through a brokerage account or a US tech equity ETF in UCITS format.

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AI data centers: local opposition is already blocking $130 billion in projects

In the United States, grassroots opposition to giant data centers is no longer a fringe phenomenon: it is blocking or delaying dozens of projects, with political support that cuts across both parties.

Key points:

  • 75 data center projects were blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 in the United States, worth a combined total of about $130 billion, according to the Data Center Watch study published in mid-June
  • The opposition is bipartisan: about 55% of officials who have publicly voiced it are Republicans; more than 300 bills on the subject were introduced in US states during the first six weeks of 2026
  • New York State has ordered a one-year pause on construction of new large data centers; Maine came within a single vote of a full moratorium in its House
  • A Gallup poll from May 2026 shows 71% of Americans oppose a data center near where they live, including 48% “strongly”

What this changes for the investment thesis

The “AI bubble” debate has so far focused on credit and the profitability of the cloud giants (see the strains already seen at Oracle or CoreWeave). This new front, local and political, adds a different kind of risk: timing. A project blocked or delayed by several months doesn’t necessarily disappear, but it pushes back expected revenue and complicates planning for electricity needs, an already tense issue. Goldman Sachs estimates that US data centers’ power demand could rise from 6% to 11% of the country’s total consumption by 2030, with about 60% of this new demand coming from the United States. Every local fight won by residents (over electricity bills, water use or noise) chips away a little at this growth trajectory, though it’s not yet possible to say by how much.

A still-diffuse risk, but one to watch

It’s not (yet) the factor driving Microsoft, Meta or Oracle stock day to day, well behind quarterly results or capex announcements. But the dynamic is new: the opposition has more than doubled since late 2025, it is now active in 49 of the 50 states, and it is starting to work its way into the campaign for the November 2026 midterm elections, which raises the likelihood of new local regulatory restrictions in the coming months. For a European investor exposed to the AI infrastructure theme through US or tech UCITS ETFs, this is less an immediate warning sign than one more factor to add to the list of the sector’s structural risks, alongside the debt financing already flagged in recent weeks.

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Edition prepared by our monitoring agent (data and sources as of Monday, August 10, 2026), reviewed in line with our editorial policy. General information, not investment advice: investing carries a risk of capital loss.