Ant Lingbo and Arab Digital Economy Alliance Sign MOU for Middle East Embodied AI Push

AFDE Assistant Secretary-General Dr. Ayman Ghoneim and Ant Lingbo commercialization lead Yu Liang signed the memorandum. The two sides will set up a regular cooperation mechanism and work on scenario applications, data model optimization and regional industrial ecosystem co-building.

The memorandum sets five core cooperation directions: promoting the regional deployment and commercialization of Ant Lingbo's embodied intelligence technologies, models and robot solutions in the UAE and other Middle East markets; conducting joint proof-of-concept and industry applications in fields including hotels and catering, retail, real estate, logistics, industrial operations, smart cities, healthcare and entertainment and guidance; exploring localization for Arabic-language interaction, regional operating environments, local workflows, cultural needs and customer demands; exploring embodied intelligence data and training collaboration in real Middle East scenarios, subject to laws, regulations and customer permission; and exploring cooperation among government agencies, companies, research institutions, universities, investors and industry partners in China and the Middle East to accelerate deployment and ecosystem building.

Ant Lingbo, an Ant Group company, builds a native general-purpose brain for robots and has developed full-stack technologies spanning spatial intelligence, dexterous manipulation and dynamic environment interaction. As of September, its related open-source models had received 31,800 stars on GitHub, placing among the leading domestic embodied intelligence models and showing global developer recognition and academic influence. The company also plans to release a 'model cloud toolchain platform'. Leiphone reported that leading model performance and a complete engineering toolchain were key considerations for AFDE in choosing Ant Lingbo.

On the industrialization path for embodied intelligence, Ant Lingbo CEO Zhu Xing previously said that generalization capability is the core economic variable determining the success of commercialization. He said the company insists on training embodied foundation large models for the physical world from scratch, aiming to allow a 'general brain' to seamlessly adapt to robot hardware of different configurations and scenarios.

Based on that technology base, Ant Lingbo's self-developed LingBot-VLA 2.0 foundation model supports 17 brands and 20 robot configurations during pretraining, which the company describes as an early industry engineering example of 'one brain, multiple machines'. The solution has been deployed in real scenarios including pharmacies, logistics and industrial loading and unloading. In a 'robot smart pharmacy' built with Shanghai Guoda Pharmacy, robots equipped with the Lingbo brain can perform all-weather precise medicine picking in aisles only 80 centimeters wide, easing operational pressure during peak hours and at night.

At this Digital Trade Expo, Leiphone reported, the partnership marks international recognition for China's self-developed embodied intelligence 'brain' and opens a cooperation model that moves from hardware cooperation toward deeper work in core technology models, engineering toolchains, localized scenario adaptation and industrial ecosystem integration. It also opens a new phase for scaling the 'one brain, multiple machines' concept in the global physical world.

Editor's Summary

Ant Lingbo Technology and the Arab Digital Economy Alliance signed a framework cooperation memorandum at the fifth Global Digital Trade Expo's China-Arab Digital Economy Industry Matchmaking Conference. The agreement targets deployment and localization of embodied AI and robotics solutions in the UAE, GCC and Middle East across five areas, including commercialization, proof-of-concept applications and data collaboration. Ant Lingbo's open-source models had 31,800 GitHub stars as of September, and its LingBot-VLA 2.0 model is already used in pharmacy and logistics scenarios.