DgcityChina has blocked SoftBank’s planned 5.4-billion-dollar acquisition of the robotics division of Swiss engineering group ABB, delivering a rare veto from Beijing and a significant setback to the Japanese investor’s push into the robotics branch of artificial intelligence. The country’s foreign-investment security review office told SoftBank on November 4 that the purchase of the ABB robotics business within China was prohibited.
SoftBank and ABB both confirmed the decision in statements, while emphasizing that they remain in close talks and are working constructively on the transaction. The rejection applies to the China portion of a global deal, and the two companies gave no immediate indication of whether the agreement can be restructured or will collapse outright.
SoftBank first agreed to buy the ABB unit in October 2025, in a deal expected to close by mid-to-late 2026. The business, which employs some 7,000 people across manufacturing sites in China, the United States and Sweden, booked 2.3 billion dollars in revenue in 2024. Founder Masayoshi Son described physical AI as the company’s next frontier, arguing that industrial robots combined with advanced AI models would reshape manufacturing.
The veto places China among the most assertive regulators scrutinizing the deal, alongside authorities in the European Union and the United States, where robotics is increasingly viewed as a strategic technology rather than ordinary industrial equipment. It also reverses the usual pattern of such reviews: rather than Washington or Brussels halting a Chinese acquisition, Beijing has used its own foreign-investment screening powers to stop a foreign buyer gaining control of robot-making assets on its soil.
For international companies, the decision signals that Beijing regards domestic robotics capacity as strategically sensitive at a moment when Chinese firms from Unitree to Xiaomi are racing to commercialize humanoid machines. ABB has built cars and electronics alongside Chinese manufacturers for decades, and its robot arms remain common in the country’s factories. Who ultimately owns that installed base — and the data and servicing relationships around it — now looks like a question Beijing intends to answer itself.
The deal’s collapse would also ripple through SoftBank’s wider strategy. The firm has committed enormous sums to AI, including stakes in leading model developers and plans for computing infrastructure, and the ABB purchase was meant to give that software bet a hardware platform of its own. Industrial robots are already being paired with vision models and language agents to handle tasks once thought too variable for automation, from sorting mixed parts to packaging consumer goods. Owning a top-tier robot maker would have let SoftBank capture both ends of that chain. Without China, the transaction’s economics and its technological logic both look weaker, since the country is the world’s largest single market for industrial robots and ABB’s Shanghai operations sit near many of its biggest customers.
