Honor's Lightning won a 50:26 half marathon with liquid-cooled joint motors as server-cooling maker Sugon Shuchuang's gross margin fell to 11.93%

Honor's robot Lightning won the 2026 Beijing E-Town humanoid half marathon on April 19 in 50 minutes 26 seconds, cooled by a system that Honor says runs liquid-cooling tubes into the robot's joint motors. The field grew from 20 teams in 2025 to more than 100 in 2026, and the first six robots across the line were all Honor's.

Liquid cooling is moving inside humanoid joints, but only robots that run hard for long stretches need it. The server liquid-cooling market suggests where the profit settles: with makers of hard-to-replace parts such as micro pumps and with whole-system thermal designers, while suppliers of standard cold plates compete on price.

A year apart, the winner ran the same course about 3.2 times as fast

At the first edition, on April 19, 2025, the Tiangong team's robot won in 2 hours 40 minutes 42 seconds and only 6 teams finished. In 2026 the field reached 102 teams and more than 300 robots; 47 finished, 18 in autonomous navigation mode, and Honor went from project start to the record in 8 months.

Both winners ran the same 21.0975 km course, which is the premise for comparing them. Tiangong's 2:40:42 is 160.7 minutes and Lightning's 50:26 is 50.4 minutes, so the 2026 winner covered the distance about 3.2 times as fast, one year later. Lightning's average works out to roughly 25 km/h; Tiangong averaged over 7 km/h in 2025.

Lightning is 169 cm tall and uses Honor's self-developed integrated joint modules with peak torque up to 400 N·m. It carries Honor's own liquid cooling system, whose high-power pump moves more than 4 liters per minute of coolant. Honor engineers say the liquid-cooling tubes reach into the motors "like human capillaries." Honor R&D staff said, "We moved the ultra-thin liquid cooling used in phones straight into the robot's joint motors." Over the 21 km run the core module stays in the 30s Celsius, about 37 °C after 10 km of continuous running, which Honor says avoids lock-ups, jamming, crashes or burning from overheating.

The 2025 winner reached thermal balance without liquid

In 2025, staff sprayed some robots with cooling agent while they ran. The winner, Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center's Tiangong Ultra, reached thermal balance without liquid cooling. Structural optimization, joint heat conduction and whole-robot thermal simulation designed air ducts that push joint heat to the main cooling zone. Its motor slot fill rate rose by more than 20% and winding end volume fell 30%, cutting copper loss by 15% to 20% at the same power, while joint cooling structure efficiency rose 30%.

This is the strongest case against treating liquid cooling as mandatory; even Honor's 2026 winner still carried three fans. Air design and motor efficiency can move a robot through a half marathon, while Chen Qi says liquid cooling is aimed at sustained high-torque running.

A 30 mm pump and a 6 mm jacket are the parts worth owning

The pump on Lightning came from Shanghai-based Huake Lengxin. Its HD01 high-speed levitation pump suspends the rotor without contact through liquid-magnetic coupled levitation, which removes mechanical friction and bearing wear. Company specs: more than 20,000 rpm, 3 to 6 times conventional pumps, a 6 L/min flow, an 18 m head, and survival of 500G shock tests. CEO Chen Qi says the pump is about 30 mm across and weighs under 100 g. "We did five product iterations for the Honor team," he said. The company says it has built its first mass-production line, with monthly capacity of thousands to around ten thousand units.

The interview with Chen describes liquid cooling as 10 to 50 times as efficient as air cooling, able to bring a core temperature from 100 °C to below 60 °C. "For a humanoid to keep running at high speed, the lower-limb joint motors need high torque output and generate a lot of heat," he said. "If cooling isn't done well, the joints can't perform, and in the middle and late stages of a run the robot starts to wobble and may even fall."

Hangzhou-based joint maker ENVO put the same idea inside the actuator itself, launching at WAIC 2026 in July. The joint combines negative-pressure liquid cooling, a cycloidal reducer and a GaN driver. ENVO says more than two thirds of a joint's heat comes from motor losses. In the negative-pressure design the coolant loop stays below atmospheric pressure, so a ruptured tube pulls air in rather than spraying coolant out, avoiding short circuits and corrosion. The jacket is multi-segment, detachable, 6 mm thick, and adds 6% to the joint's weight. Against ENVO's first lab prototype, cooling efficiency improved by more than 30%, and ENVO says the jacket cuts a joint's temperature rise by more than 80% and holds the coil near 30 °C under high load over long periods. It calls the joint the industry's first with active cooling.

Both ENVO's and Huake Lengxin's figures are company claims. If an outside lab reproduces the 6% weight for an 80% cut in temperature rise under sustained load, joint-level cooling becomes a straightforward trade.

Server cooling grew revenue without growing profit

The server liquid-cooling market is the closest evidence for where component margins go. Per Jiemian's count, all five leading Chinese liquid-cooling companies grew revenue in the first half of 2026, but only Tongfei and Gaolan grew net profit; the other three saw profit fall or posted losses. Envicool's first-half revenue was 3.017 billion yuan with net profit attributable to shareholders down 14.32%, and Shenling's net profit fell 64.07%.

Sugon Shuchuang is the clearest case. Its cold-plate liquid-cooling revenue grew 290.09%, to 209 million yuan, while total revenue grew 75.56%, and the company still lost 73 million yuan. Cost of sales rose 92.03%, faster than revenue. The company says cold-plate products are in a market-entry phase with intense competition and margins usually below immersion cooling, and their larger share of sales pulled its overall gross margin down to 11.93%, 7.56 percentage points lower than a year earlier.

Analyst Jian Jingjing of MIR Databank draws the line between parts and systems. "Competition in standalone components has turned into involution, with very limited profit room; complete liquid-cooling system solutions have become the main way for domestic businesses to protect profit," she said. She expects profit release from scale to show from 2028.

The hard-to-replace parts are also hard to make. According to research cited by TMTPost, Japan's Tsugami alone received more than 2,000 orders for liquid-cooling Swiss-type lathes in the first five months of 2026, matching its full 2025 total, and expects about 6,000 for the year, with lead times of 5 to 12 months. The profit follows the scarce precision parts, while standard cold plates are where competition is hardest.

Lightning carried its cooling in a backpack: three high-power fans that Honor compares to PC case fans, a water tank and the circulation tubes, so the record run used air and liquid at once.