Most people in China know Sun Yuchen from his bizarre stories.

Paying $30 million to invite Buffett to dinner, only to cancel at dinner time using a kidney stone; spending $6.2 million to buy a banana taped to a wall and eating it in front of everyone at the press conference; investing $75 million to become the largest financier of Trump family’s cryptocurrency project, securing a seat at a White House dinner; flying past the Kármán line at 35 years old, declaring himself the youngest Chinese commercial astronaut.

There are numerous negatives too. In 2023, he was sued by the SEC for market manipulation, accused of over 600,000 wash trades to pump up TRX prices, and hiring celebrities for promotion without disclosure of compensation. He is currently in mutual lawsuits with the Trump family-related project WLFI.

These stories have spread so widely that they nearly overshadow a serious matter. This man has hardly missed betting on any trend in the secondary capital markets over the past decade.

Starting to buy BTC in 2013, by 2016, he advised the post-90s generation not to buy houses, but to buy:

Bitcoin, Nvidia, Tesla, Tencent.

Ten years later. As of May 2026, Tesla’s total return is approximately 2683%, Nvidia’s total return is nearly 24000%.

If you had listened to Brother Sun back then, investing 10,000 yuan in Nvidia would now be 2.4 million; 10,000 yuan in Tesla would now be 278,000. An audience member who invested 200,000 yuan in each of those items from the 2016 list would have seen Nvidia turn into about 48 million and Tesla into about 5.4 million, totaling just over 53 million.

This man is still actively participating today. On November 6, 2025, Sun Yuchen threw out a phrase:

“Short-term lack of chips, long-term lack of energy, forever lack of storage.”

The capital market's reaction to this statement only entered a frenzy starting in 2026. SanDisk (SNDK), spun off from Western Digital, rose from a low of about $35 to $1439 in a year, with a maximum increase of nearly 50 times.

HBM memory production capacity from Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron is fully booked, and by 2026 it has already sold out, with orders lined up until 2027-2028.

While everyone is still chasing the storage concept, at the beginning of 2026, Sun Yuchen changed his focus in a video.

The video originally discussed the outlook for 2026. Besides including health topics in the new year's list, he also dedicated time to focus on young people regarding: embodied intelligence, drones, spatial computing, and space exploration.

The author has gathered Sun Yuchen’s public statements over the past two years on these four directions, looking at them collectively, each path has sprouted its preliminary leaders in capital.

Who is the next storage stock?

The first thing Sun Yuchen pointed to was embodied intelligence.

The concept of robots has been discussed by humans for at least a hundred years. The term "Robot" was coined by Czech playwright Karel Čapek in 1920, and industrial robotic arms have been in use since the 1980s. Honda's ASIMO could navigate stairs more than twenty years ago. But the real bottleneck has always been the brain.

In the past two years, the entire industry has turned to the VLA model: Visual-Language-Action. In layman's terms, previous robots worked based on code, while current robots are starting to see the world and take action.

Yushu Technology is expected to ship over 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, ranking first in the world, and submitted an IPO application to the Science and Technology Innovation Board in March 2026. Galaxy Universal raised $300 million (about 2.1 billion yuan) in a new round of financing in December 2025, with total financing approaching $800 million and a valuation of $3 billion (about 21.1 billion yuan), setting both single round and cumulative financing records in embodied intelligence.

Sun Yuchen said there’s a high probability he won't personally enter the robot manufacturing field, but he has a keen sense of this narrative and capital flow direction. He once said in an interview with Bloomberg, “In a market where 99% of people don't know what a wallet is, the education cost must be included in the business model.”

This statement applied to stablecoins in 2018 and is still applicable in 2026. 99% of Chinese people have yet to use a humanoid robot, but as long as that robot can cook, move boxes, and care for the elderly, that remaining 1% will be the next opportunity.

His second focus is on drones.

While humanoid robots are still climbing the production curve, drones have already taken the lead in commercial deployment. They are inherently suitable for AI tasks, from autonomous navigation to collective coordination to data collection; AI is well-versed in these duties. They do not need to walk; flying is actually simpler than humanoid robots.

On the battlefield in Ukraine, AI drone swarms have taken over a major part of the role previously played by tank units, with Ukraine's annual drone production target climbing to several hundred thousand. In the rice fields of rural China, DJI's agricultural drones are in the air, with one drone performing the work of ten farm workers. Meituan from Shenzhen has already streamlined drone delivery, with the time from order to delivery not exceeding 15 minutes.

Drones are ahead of humanoid robots. They are the first form of AI to successfully run a commercial loop in the physical world.

Sun Yuchen's third focus is spatial computing, which is the least mainstream among the several directions he points to.

When Apple released the Vision Pro in 2024, most people viewed it as an overpriced VR headset. This could be a misreading.

The ambition of Vision Pro has little to do with VR. It is Apple's first attempt to let AI understand space—how big your living room is, how far the table is from you, whether the coffee cup is on the left or right side of the sofa, and whether you can reach it by stretching out your hand. This sounds simple but is ten times harder to execute than training ChatGPT. A large language model only needs to understand language, while spatial computing requires understanding physics.

This just happens to be the common premise for robots, drones, and autonomous driving; they all require a kind of spatial intelligence. Nvidia's Cosmos platform, Google's Genie 3 world model, and Tesla’s FSD are all doing the same thing: transitioning AI from understanding text to understanding the world.

ChatGPT only needs to understand language, but the next generation of AI has to understand the world itself.

For the first three pathways, Sun Yuchen has only mentioned them verbally; when it comes to space, he has genuinely gone there in person.

On August 3, 2025, he sat in the Blue Origin's "New Shepard" NS-34 capsule and flew past the Kármán line.

Upon returning to Earth, he expressed an ambition to transform his company from just a "cryptocurrency exchange" into an "infrastructure service provider for the space economy," enabling blockchain to tackle the issues of space asset rights, satellite data trading, and interplanetary payments. It sounds no different from science fiction. But looking back at how he preached USDT ten years ago, people thought it was just as much science fiction.

Back on Earth, he conveyed a more direct message to young people, stating, “Space exploration is a common mission for all humanity. I hope that through this flight, I can inspire more young people to engage in technology and innovation to collectively shape humanity's interstellar future.”

Brother Sun’s investment logic

Sun Yuchen openly expresses his investment logic: find paths with clear direction and layout simultaneously at both ends, without betting on the execution strength of a single company.

For the robotic line, his framework is to separate betting on the body and the brain.

For Tesla, he bets on the body. In early 2026, Tesla announced the suspension of Model S and Model X production, converting the Fremont factory into the Optimus production line, aiming for an annual output of one million units, with a unit production cost of about $20,000 to $25,000; the existing version of Optimus is already handling part sorting in Austin and Fremont, with Gen 3 production line launching in the summer of 2026.

For Nvidia, he bets on the brain. Jetson Thor integrates server-level AI inference into the robot body, and Isaac GR00T has almost become the industry's general foundation, with Jensen Huang proclaiming 1 billion humanoid robots globally by 2035 at GTC.

Whether Optimus can deliver as promised is Musk's problem, not Nvidia's. As long as the track is valid, the toll will still be collected.

For the drone line, the core judgment is the irreversibility of Physical AI in military scenarios.

AeroVironment’s Switchblade loitering munition has become an iconic weapon in Ukraine, with monthly production capacity ramping up from 40 to 500 units, targeting 1200 units, and a $3.9 billion order has locked in revenue for the next three years; Kratos's XQ-58 Valkyrie is the "loyal wingman" of the F-35, flying support in missions while costing less than a fifth-generation aircraft, experiencing a 280% increase in 2025 and another 72% in 2026.

One makes tanks uneconomical, while the other renders piloted aircraft superfluous, creating complementary logic at both ends.

For the space line, Sun Yuchen purchased a seat for $28 million on Blue Origin in 2021, and this money was donated to the Blue Origin STEM nonprofit fund, distributed to 19 nonprofits. On August 3, 2025, he completed a suborbital flight on the New Shepard NS-34 mission.

In the public market, SpaceX submitted a confidential IPO draft to the SEC in April 2026, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion, aiming to become the largest IPO in human history; Rocket Lab exceeded $200 million in revenue in Q1 2026, directly serving as an alternative when SpaceX is unavailable.

Once SpaceX goes public, the pricing coordinates for the entire space sector will need to be rewritten.

Listen to Brother Sun

Putting together Sun Yuchen's statements from the past two years, “AI, robots, and blockchain have reached the iPhone moment” reflects his judgment on embodied intelligence. “Robot armies, robot police” are his predictions for autonomous weaponized AI. “The integration of AI, robots, and spatial computing” is his bet on the next generation human-machine interface. “Earth is too small, it's our home” signifies his perspective shift after flying past the Kármán line.

The four matters combined present the full picture of Physical AI.

In the past twenty years, the internet has changed the flow of information. WeChat replaced writing letters, Taobao replaced marketplaces, Douyin replaced television.

But the underlying rules of the physical world have not changed; workers are still workers, and factories are still factories.

In the next twenty years, AI might change the very way the real world operates. Factories could have humanoid robots that stand without needing breaks, autonomous vehicles might flow on roads, swarms of drones might roar on battlefields, and the first “residents” landing on the moon and Mars could very likely be advanced AI robots.

The young man who told everyone not to buy houses in 2016 has now flown past the Kármán line.

Meanwhile, most of us might still be waiting for the next Yanjiao.

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