Hugging Face's French subsidiary has launched the $399 open-source robot Microduck, which has sold over 10,000 units since its release, generating over $5 million in revenue. The delivery date has been pushed back to after Christmas 2026. The Microduck is powered by the RK3566 chip from Chinese chipmaker Rockchip, utilizing ARM's licensed technology from the UK. The company's stock price has seen a continuous rise following this news. A robot resembling a duck, priced at $399, sold over ten thousand units within days of its launch, boosting the Chinese chip supplier Rockchip's stock price on the A-share market.
According to a recent report by CNBC, the Microduck robot introduced by Hugging Face's French subsidiary Pollen Robotics has sold over 10,000 units since its unveiling last Thursday, with sales exceeding $5 million as of Tuesday night. Strong order demand has led to a delay in delivery for new orders until after Christmas 2026.
Fueled by the news of Microduck's strong sales, Shanghai-listed company Rockchip, which provides the core computing chip for it, saw its stock price rise consecutively on Monday and Tuesday, attracting market attention. The stock price has recorded an approximately 15% cumulative increase over the past 5 days, although there was a slight pullback today.
A Duck that Ignites a Chinese Chip
Each Microduck is priced at $399, weighs about 800 grams, is around 25 cm tall, and is equipped with sensors such as a camera, microphone, speaker, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a LiDAR sensor.
Its core computing unit comes from Rockchip's RK3566 chip. According to Pollen Robotics, the choice of Rockchip was due to its "1 TOPS NPU on board," meaning a Neural Processing Unit capable of 10 trillion operations per second.
Omdia's Chief Analyst, Lian Jye Su, positions Rockchip as a "key vendor for edge AI," stating that its chips are widely used in machine vision scenarios involving object detection and image recognition.
However, Lian Jye Su also highlighted limitations, saying, "Although Rockchip's chips have a wide application scope, they are not designed for complex edge AI devices due to the lack of sufficient compute resources."
The RK3566 chip also incorporates licensed technology from the UK-based semiconductor company ARM.
Microduck: Open Source, Trainable, More Than Just a "Toy Duck"
The key selling point of Microduck is not its ability to roller skate or grab socks, but the fact that users can "teach" it themselves.
Wall Street News previously mentioned that Microduck supports reinforcement learning—robots gradually learn new physical skills through trial and error rather than relying on pre-programming by engineers. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue referred to it as the "first affordable AI robot that can be taught new skills through reinforcement learning."
He also mentioned that the team intentionally designed Microduck to be "born for movement and ready to fall," emphasizing, "We also hope that these robots can teach people that robots may fail, may make mistakes, and you need to consider this in the design."
Microduck, without traditional dual arms, uses a movable "duck beak" for grasping, can pick up objects weighing up to about 800 grams, and can stand up again after being pushed over.
High Demand Leads to Delayed Deliveries
Hugging Face co-founder and Chief Scientist Thomas Wolf posted on social media that users have started monitoring Microduck's supply chain, and the company is facing a surge in orders.
After Microduck's pre-orders opened, sales reached a rate of one unit sold every 4 seconds at one point. Hugging Face aims to sell over 20,000 units, with the initial batch originally scheduled for delivery before Christmas. However, the delivery dates for new orders have now been delayed.
Microduck is manufactured in China with production involvement from Seeed Studio, an open-source hardware manufacturer based in Shenzhen.
Hugging Face Expands into Physical AI as NVIDIA Acquisition Rumors Linger
Microduck is the second robot released by Hugging Face. Previously, Hugging Face collaborated with Pollen Robotics to launch Reachy Mini, with the first batch selling over 10,000 units; subsequently, Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics.
Just on the eve of the Microduck release, The Information reported that NVIDIA had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for around $12.9 billion. Both companies have declined to comment on this.
Meanwhile, similar products have also emerged on the market: the startup company Zeroth has launched a child-sized humanoid robot priced at 8888 yuan; Mondo Robotics' Wall-E-style camera robot has exceeded 80 times its funding goal on Kickstarter, starting at an early bird price of $549.
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
