Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung used the July 25 San Francisco AI Summit to lay out the Korean conglomerate's roadmap for becoming a "Physical AI solution company," anchored by a new open-source Robot Reference Platform co-developed with NVIDIA that will be handed to Korean universities, research institutes and startups.
From cars and robots to city-level intelligence
Chung told an audience of roughly 150 executives, students and startup founders that Hyundai's Physical AI ambitions extend well beyond the vehicles and robots the Group builds today. The vision, he said, begins with intelligent devices, expands to intelligent spaces like AI factories that autonomously orchestrate logistics and quality management, and ultimately reaches "integrated intelligence at the city level" — energy, mobility and robotics systems connected and optimized in real time.
Central to that pitch is a "data flywheel" that funnels real-world operational data from Hyundai's plants, vehicles and robotics deployments back into AI models, which are then redeployed to sharpen performance in production environments.
NVIDIA, Waymo and DeepMind at the center
Chung outlined three anchor partnerships. With NVIDIA, Hyundai is expanding beyond its previously announced 50,000-Blackwell-GPU supply deal to establish a Hyundai Motor Group Robot Application Center and NVIDIA AI Technology Center in Korea, feed digital-twin platforms to its manufacturing plants, and integrate NVIDIA's automotive semiconductors and sensors into future vehicle platforms.
On the autonomy side, Chung reiterated that Hyundai plans to build IONIQ 5 vehicles with autonomy-ready modifications at its Metaplant America (HMGMA) in Georgia for Waymo, and that Boston Dynamics' strategic partnership with Google DeepMind will accelerate the humanoid Atlas platform. A separate U.S. robot production facility with up to 30,000 units of annual capacity by 2028 is planned, with Atlas first deployed inside HMGMA.
An open Robot Reference Platform for Korea
The Robot Reference Platform is the most concrete Chung-era deliverable: a standardized hardware-and-software research robot, jointly developed by Hyundai and NVIDIA, that will be distributed to Korean universities, research labs and startups as an open ecosystem for Physical AI experimentation. It plugs into a broader domestic strategy that includes a roughly KRW 9 trillion Saemangeum AI Valley — spanning AI data centers, a robotics manufacturing cluster and hydrogen infrastructure — and a KRW 42 trillion, decade-long push to seed advanced industrial hubs in Korea's Yeongnam region.
Why it matters
Hyundai's SF pitch positions the Group as one of the few incumbents attempting to weld manufacturing-scale hardware capabilities to a Physical AI stack that other Korean industry, academia and startups can build on. Chung's willingness to open the reference platform contrasts with the more closed hardware roadmaps at some of Hyundai's peers, and puts additional public pressure on Seoul to keep investing in domestic AI infrastructure alongside NAVER-NVIDIA-Brookfield's Sejong AI factory.
Reporting based on Hyundai Motor Group's July 25 newsroom release and coverage from CleanTechnica and Seoul Economic Daily.