China positioned to lead AI deployment in factories as Europe races to catch up

The global AI race is usually framed as a chatbot contest. On factory floors, it looks very different, and China is reportedly out in front. According to Bloomberg, China is leading the deployment of artificial intelligence in manufacturing, while Europe is scrambling to build its own industrial AI programs. The numbers behind China’s factory lead China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, representing 54% of the global total. More than half of the world’s new factory robots that year went to a single country. China’s operational stock of industrial robots now exceeds 2 million units. Adoption of AI in Chinese manufacturing is estimated at around 67%, suggesting the technology has moved well past the pilot-project phase for many producers. China is the world’s largest manufacturing nation, which gives it more factories to automate and more production data to feed into AI systems. Beijing’s “AI Plus” initiative aims to weave AI into a broad range of industrial sectors. Chinese AI models had closed the performance gap with US leaders to approximately 3% on benchmarks as of September 2026. Europe’s play: data, not chatbots Europe is leaning on what it already has: deep industr...