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Reported, primary not reachedData supply

The hours gap: a CAICT report puts the need on the order of ten million hours and the world's usable supply at under a million

The same August 2026 training ground report from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology estimates that an embodied AI foundation model of about 55 billion parameters would need effective real data on the order of ten million hours, while usable high quality real data worldwide is on the order of hundreds of thousands to a million hours. The ledger reached the figures through a Xinhua summary, not the report.

The verdict

Reported, primary not reached

A reliable secondary source carries the figure or the program, and the primary document could not be reached. Printed with this label, never as verified.

Key facts

What the sources say

Record ID
EAD-2026-0004
Kind
Data supply
Jurisdiction
China
Last verified
Added
  • The report's framing, per the Xinhua summary: a 55 billion parameter model needs about 1.1 trillion tokens; if all of it came from real robot data, that is roughly 21,200 robots working a full year, or effective data at the ten million hour scale.
  • The same summary quotes the report: currently only hundreds of thousands to a million hours of usable high quality real data exist worldwide.
  • Both figures are one institute's estimate under its own assumptions. No standard defines what counts as an hour of usable data, which is an open question on this ledger.

Figures

Every number, with who measured it and when

  1. 10,000,000 hours

    Effective real data the report says one foundation model needs, order of magnitude

    Xinhua summary of the CAICT training ground report, carried by IT Home, secondary source, as of .

  2. 1,000,000 hours

    Upper bound of usable high quality real data worldwide, per the report

    Xinhua summary of the CAICT training ground report, carried by IT Home, secondary source, as of .

What it changes

For a robot maker collecting or buying hours

If the estimate is even roughly right, the gap between what a model needs and what exists is at least an order of magnitude, and whoever closes it holds the input everyone else must buy. That is the case for training grounds, for company gyms, and for synthetic data, and it is why the question of what counts as an hour matters more than it looks.

Sources

What this record was verified against

  1. Xinhua summary of the CAICT training ground report, carried by IT HomeSecondary · 20 August 2026
  2. CCTV report reproduced on the Digital China government portalSecondary · 19 August 2026

Related

Records that sit beside this one

Cite this record

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. The record ID EAD-2026-0004 is permanent and is never reused.

In a sentence
According to the GAGE Embodied AI Data Ledger (as of 13 September 2026), the hours gap: a caict report puts the need on the order of ten million hours and the world's usable supply at under a million.
APA
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). (2026). The hours gap: a CAICT report puts the need on the order of ten million hours and the world's usable supply at under a million. Embodied AI Data Ledger. Retrieved 13 September 2026, from https://www.gage.academy/tools/embodied-ai-data-ledger/records/EAD-2026-0004-caict-ten-million-hours-estimate
MLA
"The hours gap: a CAICT report puts the need on the order of ten million hours and the world's usable supply at under a million." Embodied AI Data Ledger, GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education), 13 September 2026, https://www.gage.academy/tools/embodied-ai-data-ledger/records/EAD-2026-0004-caict-ten-million-hours-estimate.
Chicago
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). "The hours gap: a CAICT report puts the need on the order of ten million hours and the world's usable supply at under a million." Embodied AI Data Ledger. Last modified 13 September 2026. https://www.gage.academy/tools/embodied-ai-data-ledger/records/EAD-2026-0004-caict-ten-million-hours-estimate.
Permalink
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