South Korea is putting a full humanoid stack in domestic hands. LG Electronics, AI optimisation specialist Nota and fabless NPU maker Mobilint will jointly develop an autonomous humanoid robot running entirely on Korean-designed silicon, the three companies said on 8 September.
MOTIE picks Nota to lead humanoid subproject
Nota said it has been selected as the lead institution for the third subproject in the humanoid category of the K On-Device AI Semiconductor Technology Development Program, run by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) and the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT). The program targets a humanoid capable of “human-level tasks” using Korean-made AI chips. LG Electronics will oversee overall system integration and the humanoid platform itself; Mobilint will supply the on-board NPU; and Nota will provide the optimisation software that runs the AI models on the target hardware.
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A VLA model pruned down to a 10-TOPS chip
Nota's job is to shrink a vision-language-action (VLA) model onto Mobilint's NPU using token compression, quantisation, pruning and knowledge distillation, its NetsPresso stack. Mobilint's second-generation REGULUS chip integrates CPU, NPU, ISP and codec on a single die, delivering 10 TOPS at only 3W of power, low enough for a battery-powered humanoid. On-device inference lets the robot see, plan and act without hitting external servers, cutting latency, tightening data security and lowering power draw.
Korea's answer to China's humanoid push
The consortium adds Korea to a widening humanoid race that on the same day saw XPENG walk its first IRON humanoid off the Guangzhou line, and follows the country's Beijing Galbot G1 pharmacy demo at IFA 2026. “Starting with humanoid robots, we will expand business opportunities across industries that need real-time on-device AI, including various robots, automobiles and industrial equipment,” Nota chief executive Chae Myung-soo said.
Reporting based on coverage from Seoul Economic Daily, Nota, LG Electronics, Mobilint and MOTIE/KEIT.