NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang visited Hyundai’s Seoul headquarters this week to expand the two companies’ physical AI partnership, centering the alliance on Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot and a sweeping plan to move robotics from research labs onto factory floors at industrial scale.
Huang met Hyundai executive chair Chung Euisun in a lobby that Hyundai has rebuilt as a physical AI testbed, with robots handling security, deliveries, and plant watering for the visit. After the talks, the two companies outlined an expanded roadmap covering mobility, manufacturing, and robotics, with Hyundai’s global manufacturing scale identified as the key advantage.
“Hyundai is incredible at manufacturing, incredible at mobility, incredible at heavy industries, manufacturing at extremely large scales,” Huang told reporters. “No one is in a better position to take advantage of that and to create that than Hyundai.” He added that the two companies are “very very close” to industrializing robotics.
The centerpiece of the expanded plan is Atlas, the humanoid robot developed by Boston Dynamics, which Hyundai owns. The production-ready version of Atlas drew investor attention at CES in January 2026. Hyundai has stated it wants to mass-produce Atlas from 2028 at up to 30,000 units per year.
The approach involves training robots in simulation first before deploying them in Hyundai’s manufacturing environments, with NVIDIA’s platforms powering both the simulation and the inference layer.
Much of the Seoul discussion focused on Hyundai’s 9 trillion won plan, approximately $5.9 billion, to build an AI data centre, a robot manufacturing cluster, and a hydrogen plant in the western port city of Saemangeum. Huang described the site as South Korea’s “AI Valley.”
Hyundai’s Chung floated a joint data hub and suggested more investment would follow if NVIDIA formally joins the project. NVIDIA has not yet committed, but the data centre is expected to run on tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs.
Markets responded immediately: Hyundai Motor shares rose nearly 7% and NVIDIA gained more than 6% on the day of the announcement.
