Foxconn opened its formal European debut at VivaTech 2026 in Paris on Wednesday, June 17, with a wheeled humanoid robot performing precision assembly in front of European industrial buyers — the first time the world's largest electronics manufacturer has shown its industrial humanoids on the continent. The demonstration reframes Foxconn not as a contract assembler of other companies' products but as a vertically integrated physical-AI platform that builds the compute that trains a model, the robot body that the model inhabits, and the electric vehicles sharing the show floor.
A Closed-Loop Physical AI Stack
At Booth 2B41 inside Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, Foxconn displayed the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack at one end and a robot executing factory work at the other. The pairing is a supply-chain argument: the same company manufactures the silicon that trains the robot's brain and the robot that uses it. A dual-arm wheeled humanoid demonstrated pick-and-place, screw fastening and material handling — the high-repetition, high-precision operations that define AI server production lines.
Trained On NVIDIA Isaac GR00T
The VivaTech robot runs no hand-coded motion scripts. Its behavior was learned through an NVIDIA Isaac GR00T simulation pipeline that combines NVIDIA FoundationPose, Isaac Sim and on-robot Jetson Thor inference, with simulation-based training refined through on-site iteration. NVIDIA Isaac Sim runs GPU-accelerated physics at up to 1,000 times real time, and a GR00T-Dreams pipeline can generate 780,000 robot trajectories in roughly eleven hours — work that would otherwise take nearly three months of manual data collection. The approach mirrors the embodied-AI push seen across the industry, from Alibaba's Qwen-Robot suite to NVIDIA and Hyundai's factory-floor alliance.
Building Vera Rubin Servers In Europe
The debut carried a hard manufacturing announcement: Foxconn, French computing firm Bull and NVIDIA formalized a milestone under which components for the Vera Rubin NVL72 supercomputer will be produced at Foxconn's facilities in the Czech Republic, then assembled and validated at Bull's factory in Angers, France. The systems will commercialize under the Bull brand — Europe's first domestically manufactured instance of NVIDIA's most advanced AI server architecture, and a direct response to European sovereign-AI concerns about dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure.
The Decision Facing European Buyers
Foxconn's appearance coincided with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's GTC Paris keynote, a progress report on the more than twenty AI factories he promised Europe a year ago. For European manufacturers in automotive, aerospace and logistics, Foxconn's pitch is that the company building NVIDIA's most advanced racks is also the company proving those racks can produce trained humanoid robots in hours rather than months — and, as of June 17, manufacturing them on European soil.
Reporting based on coverage from Tech Times, PR Newswire and Hon Hai Technology Group.