The 36-month lockup is the merger announcement

In China's embodied-AI market, consolidation is happening through long-lockup strategic placements, not M&A. The months on the lockup are the merger announcement.

DeepSeek's ¥141 million (roughly $20 million) placement in Unitree's Shanghai IPO carries that tell. The stake is 2.31%, or 933,390 shares at ¥150.80, locked for 36 months, three times the typical 12-month window for strategic investors. The size is small. The duration is the load-bearing detail.

QbitAI's reporting on the strategic-placement filing lays out the cooperation: joint R&D to put a general-purpose AI model inside a physical robot, mutual priority procurement, and DeepSeek's model architecture, training compute, and data-center support for Unitree. That is a partner stack, not a capital stack. The stake is the down payment; the lockup is the term sheet.

Read the next AI-robotics placement on two numbers before the total. A 2% stake with a 12-month lockup is a financial vote. A 2% stake with a 36-month lockup is a product roadmap priced in equity. Everyone still buying options is buying the right to be late.