The lobby of Hyundai’s Seoul headquarters now waters its own plants. On Monday it was also handling security and deliveries, a row of robots laid on for one important visitor: Jensen Huang.
Nvidia’s chief executive was in the South Korean capital to deepen the chipmaker’s alliance with Hyundai Motor Group, and the pitch on display in that remodelled lobby, which Hyundai has rebuilt as a “physical AI testbed”, was the whole point.
After talks with Hyundai executive chair Chung Euisun, the two companies laid out an expanded plan to turn physical AI and robotics from research projects into industrial products, spanning mobility, manufacturing, and robotics.
The two are getting “very very close” to industrialising robotics, Huang told reporters, adding that they plan to bring AI to “all forms of mobility.” He was effusive about his host’s main advantage, scale.
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“Hyundai is incredible at manufacturing, incredible at mobility, incredible at heavy industries, manufacturing at extremely large scales,” he said. “No one is in a better position to take advantage of that and to create that than Hyundai.”
The clearest shift in the roadmap is location: moving robotics off the lab bench and onto the factory floor. The companies want to use Hyundai’s manufacturing base to build globally scalable robotics platforms, training the machines in simulation first. The marquee example is Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid, the Hyundai-owned robot whose production-ready version drew investor attention at January’s CES.
Much of the conversation centred on Hyundai’s 9 trillion won (about $5.9bn) plan to build an AI data centre, a robot manufacturing cluster, and a hydrogen plant in the western port city of Saemangeum, a site Huang cheerfully rebranded South Korea’s “AI Valley.”
Chung suggested more investment would follow and floated a “perfect AI ecosystem,” including a joint data hub, if Nvidia formally joins the project. Notably, it has not yet. For now Nvidia’s commitment is enthusiasm, plus the prospect of selling a great deal of compute, with the data centre expected to run on tens of thousands of its Blackwell GPUs.
The courtship fits Nvidia’s wider strategy. It has been wiring itself into the hardware end of AI, holding talks with LG Electronics on robotics and data centres, running factory-floor humanoid trials with Siemens, and pouring billions into AI equity stakes. Carmakers, with their plants, supply chains, and capital, are among the most valuable partners for a company betting that the same models behind chatbots will soon run machines in the real world.
Investors liked what they heard, with Hyundai Motor shares jumping almost 7% and Nvidia rising more than 6% on the day. Hyundai has said it wants to mass-produce Atlas from 2028, at up to 30,000 units a year. Whether the robots arrive on schedule is another question, but the ambition is plain.
For Hyundai, the future of carmaking looks less like an assembly line than a fleet of machines that taught themselves the job. For Nvidia, it is one more industry that runs on its chips, from the design software to the factory floor to the robots rolling off it.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
