Hugging Face's $399 Robot Duck Sells Out, Powered by Chinese Chip

The 25-centimeter duck on roller-skate wheels, with a single eye and a beak that grips small objects, has become one of the fastest-selling robotics products in recent months. Microduck, a robot built by French startup Pollen Robotics in partnership with the Hugging Face platform, sold more than 10,000 units in the week after launch.

Pollen Robotics, acquired by Hugging Face in April 2025, designed Microduck as a cheap, open-source piece of hardware for learning physical AI in home settings rather than labs. The robot can walk with a duck-like gait, crouch, get back up after falling, and pick up small objects with its beak, and its behaviors can be trained using reinforcement learning.

What's inside

Microduck's design relies on a camera, a depth sensor, and two IMU units that measure the device's movement and orientation. Processing data and running the control policies falls to a Rockchip RK3566 processor, made by a Shanghai-listed Chinese company that licenses its architecture from British chipmaker ARM.

Omdia analyst Lian Jye Su rates Rockchip as a key supplier of chips for local, on-device AI processing rather than cloud-based processing, mostly found in simpler applications like object detection and image recognition. He cautions, however, that the company's chips are not designed for more complex edge AI tasks, since they lack the computing power for advanced operations.

Open code, closed supply chain

Hugging Face has publicly released an SDK, a training simulation environment, and a complete reinforcement learning stack on GitHub, meant to let developers modify the robot's behaviors without licensing restrictions. The hardware itself, however, remains dependent on a single Chinese silicon supplier, showing how difficult it is in practice to separate open-source software from global semiconductor supply chains.

Welcome to the era of open-source affordable robots to democratize physical AI - Clem Delangue, CEO Hugging Face

Microduck's sales success coincides with Rockchip's own growing results. The Chinese company reported 2.88 billion yuan, or about $428 million, in operating revenue for the first half of 2026, up 40 percent year over year, while net profit jumped more than 60 percent.

Geopolitical context

A Western company's reliance on a Chinese processor in a popular, mass-market consumer device lands at a moment of heightened trade tensions over access to AI chips between the US, China, and Europe. Microduck's story shows, however, that global semiconductor supply chains still cross political borders, with British ARM architecture ending up in a Chinese chip that in turn powers a French-American product sold worldwide.

Demand for Microduck arrived as Hugging Face finds itself in the industry spotlight for other reasons too, including talk of a possible acquisition by Nvidia at a valuation reaching into the tens of billions of dollars. The robot duck, though small and cheap, fits into the company's broader strategy of building affordable, open robotic hardware alongside earlier products like Reachy Mini and Reachy Mini Lite, sold at similar price points.

For Poland's tech market, Microduck's story is above all a signal of how quickly cheap, open-source physical robotics is becoming a mass-market product rather than just a research project or hobbyist toy. A price under $400 and an open training stack mean similar devices could reach Polish schools, technical universities, or robotics-education startups far faster than expensive humanoid platforms.