A representative from Intel gets a cup of coffee from a robot barista. [Photo/Tide News]

A newly opened high-tech cafe in Hangzhou has captured the attention of global chip giant Intel, highlighting the city's growing strength in embodied artificial intelligence.

On the afternoon of April 15, a delegation from Intel visited the Xizi AI2 Robotics, located on the 12th floor of Building 19 in the Xizi Smart Industrial Park. Their visit aimed to explore collaboration opportunities around the cafe's innovative application of robotics and distributed computing.

The cafe features a humanoid robot barista named Aibao, developed by Shenzhen-based AI2 Robotics. Customers place orders via a tablet, after which the robot prepares and serves coffee within about one minute. Equipped with a proprietary embodied AI model, Aibao demonstrates multimodal perception, task understanding, and adaptive learning in real-world environments.

In addition to coffee-making, robots are deployed for tasks such as fruit sorting and data collection, with students from Xizi Mechanical and Electrical School participating through teleoperation systems. The robots utilize Intel's cloud-edge-device collaborative computing solution, providing real-time externalized "brains" to support complex operations.

The cafe also signals the beginning of deeper cooperation between Xizi and Intel, with the company planning to establish China's first Intel Embodied Intelligence Frontier Innovation Center in the park.

As more real-world applications — in areas such as residential services, retail guidance, and smart building security — are introduced, the industrial park is set to become a testing ground and data hub for the next generation of intelligent robotics, further strengthening Hangzhou's ambition to become a leading global center for AI innovation.

An Intel representative learns about a humanoid robot. [Photo/Tide News]