A quirky new robot from Hugging Face is flying off the shelves, and its supply chain is turning out to be just as interesting as the product itself.
Meet the Microduck
The “Microduck” is a colorful, duck-shaped personal robot built by Pollen Robotics, the French robotics startup that Hugging Face acquired last year. Standing about 25 centimeters tall and weighing under 800 grams, it’s designed to be both a consumer toy and a hands-on development platform. The robot ships with a camera, a depth sensor, two inertial measurement units (IMUs), 15 motors, and a jointed beak that can grasp small objects. According to its makers, it can walk, crouch, recover from a tip-over, and even roller-skate. Buyers can choose from four colorways — Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky.
Priced at $399, the Microduck launched last Thursday and has already sold more than 10,000 units, pushing total sales past $4 million and, by some counts, above $5 million within days. That surge of orders has been enough to push delivery timelines past the company’s original Christmas 2026 target. It’s the second robot to come out of Pollen Robotics since Hugging Face bought the company — the first, launched last spring, also crossed 10,000 units sold.
The Chip Inside Is the Real Story
What’s drawing extra attention isn’t just how fast the Microduck is selling — it’s what’s powering it. Each unit runs on Rockchip’s RK3566 processor, a chip built by the Shanghai-listed Chinese company, which licenses core technology from the British chip designer ARM. It’s a small but telling reminder of how tangled global tech supply chains remain, even for a $399 toy.
A company representative said the RK3566 was chosen for its onboard neural processing unit (NPU), rated at 1 TOPS (tera operations per second) — a measure of AI computing performance. For comparison, Nvidia’s upcoming Jetson Orin Nano 2 robotics chip claims a rated capacity of 78 TOPS, underscoring just how lightweight the Microduck’s onboard AI hardware really is next to dedicated robotics silicon.
Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, described Rockchip as an important supplier for AI that runs directly on devices rather than in the cloud, noting that its chips are widely used in machine-vision tasks like object detection and image recognition. He also cautioned that despite Rockchip’s broad market reach, its chips aren’t built for the heaviest edge-AI workloads because they lack the raw compute resources for that tier of task.
Rockchip itself has been on a strong run — the company reported a 40% year-over-year jump in first-half operating revenue to 2.88 billion yuan (about $428 million), with net profit, excluding one-time items, up more than 60%.
A Bigger Moment for Hugging Face
The Microduck’s launch lands at an unusually eventful time for its parent company. Just before the robot went on sale, reports surfaced that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Hugging Face in a deal valued at $12.9 billion — a claim neither company has confirmed or denied publicly.
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf acknowledged the frenzy around the robot in a social media post, noting that people had started closely tracking the Microduck’s supply chain as order volume kept climbing.
Not the Only Duck in the Pond
The Microduck also arrives as personal and companion robots become a more crowded space at the consumer end of the market. Startup Zeroth, for instance, launched a child-sized humanoid robot this summer priced at 8,888 yuan, marketed around similar simulation-based learning capabilities.
For now, though, the Microduck’s combination of low price, playful design, and viral early demand has made it one of the more surprising consumer robotics stories of the year — even if the chip quietly running the show came from a very different part of the world than the duck’s French design studio.