A US-listed brand sells a walking humanoid for $2,490. Filings say Chinese OEMs build them.

A US-listed brand now sells a walking humanoid for $2,490. Three days earlier, that same stack signed an all-stock deal that leaves Faraday Future owning about 65.7% of the robotics vehicle. Parent filings still warn of reliance on Chinese OEMs for all of its robotics products.

Humanoid coverage this autumn still sells six-figure industrial demos and billion-dollar valuations. The quieter signal is a consumer / developer price floor that looks more like a laptop than a lab. FF Nova is the deep dive. The deal terms and the OEM risk factor are the same-week context that makes the sticker price matter.

$2,490 for a walking humanoid — invite phase is still invite-only

Per the joint FF EAI Robotics (FFR) and Faraday Future launch on 15 Oct 2026, FF Nova is priced at $2,490 for the device, plus $390 for the Developer Skills Package. Company specs: 20 whole-body degrees of freedom, LiDAR, and depth / wide-angle vision with multimodal sensors. The invite phase is capped at 100 invitation-only units for developers and education, with the first 20 ready for immediate delivery. The launch is framed in three phases: invite → all developers/education → consumer.^[1]

Alongside it, FF Nova Mini lands at $299 for the device (curriculum priced separately at a company $499). Marketing also pushes a Physical AI Spark Program curriculum and a Nova reinforcement-learning developer program — treat those as company program language, not independent curriculum ratings.^[1]

The line that will travel on social: the company calls Nova the “first embodied AI humanoid robot priced below $2,500 in the US.” That is a company claim. behindrobotics stores the price and invite-phase counts as confirmed from the release; the “first” framing stays labelled.^[1]

All-stock: ~$200M robotics business, FFAI ~65.7% after close

Three days before the product launch, on 12 Oct 2026, FF EAI Robotics Ecosystem signed definitive agreements to combine Faraday Future’s full robotics business into FFR. Per the IR release:

• ~$200M valuation for FFAI’s robotics business / assets
• ~$60M valuation for FFR (fully diluted)
• Share issuance at $2.246 per share — about a 50% premium to the $1.50 close on the signing date
• After closing (targeted end of October), FFAI would own about 65.7% of FFR

Read together with the $2,490 sticker: the US-listed robotics vehicle is being folded under the EV parent that already carries the OEM risk language. Ownership concentration and supply-chain risk travel together.^[2]

US brand on the storefront. Chinese OEMs in the filings.

Faraday Future’s own forward-looking / risk language lists “reliance on Chinese OEMs for all of its robotics products”, and separately “reliance on a single OEM for most of its robotics products”, plus tariff and possible import-ban exposure.^[3]

That is the tension buyers and regulators will actually price — not the stage demo. A US Nasdaq brand and a laptop-class sticker price sit on top of a hardware stack the parent itself flags as Chinese-OEM dependent. Tariffs, import rules, and buyer trust are not footnotes when the device is aimed at developers and, later, consumers.^[3]

Nova vs Unitree R1, Flourish 1, and 1X NEO

Sticker-price context from the behindrobotics database and company sources used in this week’s research:

The compression is the story. A year of humanoid discourse priced around expensive industrial pilots just got a US-listed SKU that undercuts Unitree’s R1 band and sits an order of magnitude under 1X NEO — while the parent’s risk factors still point at Chinese OEMs for every robotics product.^[1][3][4]

Three signals after the $2,490 floor prints

1. Whether the invite phase’s 100 invite units and the first 20 immediate deliveries actually clear — or the $2,490 price stays a marketing floor with thin volume.
2. Whether the FFR × FFAI close lands end-October with the stated ~65.7% FFAI ownership, and how FFR discloses OEM concentration after combination.
3. Whether tariff / import-ban risk language in FFAI filings shows up as delivery delays, price resets, or supply switches — the real test of a US brand on Chinese hardware.