Hugging Face's $399 "AI Duck" is selling well, and Chinese chip supplier Rockchip has raised its prices for two consecutive days.

An open-source robot that looks like a duck and costs $399 sold over 10,000 units within days of its launch, prompting the Chinese chip supplier Rockchip to see its stock price rise continuously on the A-share market.

According to a recent CNBC report, Pollen Robotics, Hugging Face's French subsidiary, has sold over 10,000 Microduck robots since their launch last Thursday, with sales exceeding $5 million as of Tuesday evening. Strong demand has led to delays in new order deliveries until after Christmas 2026.

Shares of Rockchip, a Shanghai-listed company that supplies core computing chips for the Microduck, rose for two consecutive days on Monday and Tuesday, drawing market attention. The stock has gained approximately 15% over the past five days, although it saw a slight pullback today.

A duck sparked a fire for a Chinese chip industry.

Each Microduck costs $399, weighs about 800 grams, and is about 25 centimeters tall. It has built-in sensors such as a camera, microphone, speaker, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LiDAR.

Its core computing unit comes from Rockchip's RK3566 chip. Pollen Robotics stated that Rockchip was chosen because of its "onboard 1 TOPS NPU"—a neural network processing unit capable of performing one trillion operations per second.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at market research firm Omdia, positions Rockchip as a “key supplier” of edge AI, noting that its chips are widely used in machine vision scenarios involving object detection and image recognition.

However, Lian Jye Su also pointed out the limitations: "Although Rockchip chips have a very wide coverage, they are not designed for complex edge AI devices due to a lack of sufficient computing power resources."

The RK3566 chip also utilizes licensed technology from the British semiconductor company ARM.

Microduck: Open source, trainable, and more than just a "toy duck"

The biggest selling point of Microduck is not that it can roller skate or grab socks, but that users can "teach" it themselves.

As previously mentioned by Wall Street Insights , Microduck supports reinforcement learning—the robot learns new physical skills gradually through trial and error, rather than relying on engineers to pre-program them. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue stated that this is "the first affordable AI robot that can teach new skills through reinforcement learning."

He also stated that the team specifically designed Microduck to be "born for movement and prepared to fall," and emphasized: "We also hope that these robots can teach people that robots can fail and make mistakes, and you need to take that into account in the design."

Microduck has no traditional arms; it grasps objects using a movable "duckbill," capable of picking up objects weighing up to about 800 grams, and can even stand up again after being knocked over.

Orders are soaring, we're running out of stock.

Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Hugging Face, posted on social media that users have begun monitoring Microduck's supply chain and the company is facing a strong influx of orders.

After Microduck opened for pre-order, sales reached a rate of one unit sold every four seconds. Hugging Face aims to sell over 20,000 units, with the first batch originally scheduled to ship before Christmas, but delivery dates for new orders have now been delayed.

Microduck is manufactured in China, with Shenzhen-based open-source hardware company Seeed Studio participating in the production.

Hugging Face ramps up its efforts in physics AI, while Nvidia acquisition rumors remain unresolved.

Microduck is Hugging Face's second robot product. Previously, Hugging Face partnered with Pollen Robotics to launch the Reachy Mini, which also sold over 10,000 units in its initial batch; Hugging Face subsequently acquired Pollen Robotics.

Just before the Microduck launch, The Information reported that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $12.9 billion. Neither company commented on the matter.

Meanwhile, similar products are emerging in the market: startup Zeroth launched a child-sized humanoid robot priced at 8,888 yuan; Mondo Robotics' Wall-E style camera robot has been oversubscribed 80 times on Kickstarter, with early bird prices starting at $549.

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