Hugging Face's Microduck, a duck-shaped robot built to teach itself new tricks, has sold more than 10,000 units within days of its launch.
At $399 a unit, that has generated more than $4 million in revenue for Pollen Robotics, the French subsidiary behind the device.
The surge in demand has already pushed delivery times for new orders beyond the company's original Christmas 2026 promise.
A one-kilogram robot with global parts
Microduck stands 25 centimetres tall, weighs 800 grams, and is built around 15 motors, a camera, a small LiDAR sensor and two inertial measurement units.
Its beak doubles as a gripper, letting it pick up small objects, while the whole software stack, including the reinforcement learning tools used to train new behaviours, is open source.
The robot's on-device computing comes from a Rockchip RK3566 processor with one gigabyte of RAM and 32 gigabytes of storage, allowing it to process data locally rather than relying on the cloud.
Rockchip is listed in Shanghai, but its chip uses technology licensed from the British semiconductor designer ARM, a detail that underlines how consumer AI hardware still depends on components sourced across multiple countries.
Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, the technology research firm, described Rockchip as a "key vendor" for AI that runs on devices rather than in data centres.
A fast-growing supplier behind the scenes
Rockchip's own results point to how strong that demand has become, with the company reporting a 40% year-on-year rise in first-half operating revenue to 2.88 billion yuan, the equivalent of $428 million.
Net profit at Rockchip, excluding one-off items, rose by more than 60% over the same period.
Second product from an acquired startup
Microduck is the second robot from Pollen Robotics, the Bordeaux-based startup that Hugging Face acquired in April last year to build affordable, open-source hardware.
Its predecessor, Reachy Mini, launched last spring and also sold more than 10,000 units, according to Pollen Robotics.
The launch comes as Hugging Face itself is reportedly close to being acquired, with The Information reporting that Nvidia had agreed to buy the company for $12.9 billion.
Reliance on Chinese chips
The scale of demand for a low-cost, developer-focused robot suggests there is a genuine consumer and hobbyist market for affordable, programmable hardware beyond the expensive humanoid robots being developed by larger rivals.
But the reliance on a single Chinese chipmaker for on-device computing also shows the production pressure that even small, low-cost hardware makers face when scaling quickly, particularly at a moment when global supply chains for AI components remain tight.
