NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met Hyundai Motor Group executive chair Chung Euisun in Seoul on June 8, 2026 to expand a robotics and physical AI alliance that now reaches from Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid all the way to a multi-billion-dollar AI hub at Saemangeum.
Atlas At The Center
The expanded roadmap puts Boston Dynamics' humanoid Atlas at the core, with Hyundai targeting mass production from 2028 at up to 30,000 units per year. NVIDIA platforms will power both the simulation training loop and the on-robot inference layer, with robots trained in Isaac Sim before being deployed into Hyundai manufacturing lines. Huang told reporters that "no one is better with robots than Hyundai," framing the partnership as the production counterweight to Tesla Optimus.
Saemangeum Becomes A Physical AI Hub
Hyundai is sinking 9 trillion won (about $5.9 billion) into Saemangeum to build an AI data center, a robot manufacturing cluster and a hydrogen plant. Local coverage says the site will run on tens of thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, anchoring a hardware base for the Atlas program and Hyundai's broader factory robotics push, while plugging into NVIDIA's Vera Rubin roadmap.
Why Markets Cheered
Hyundai shares jumped roughly 7% on the announcement and NVIDIA added more than 6%. The expansion follows Hyundai's earlier pledge to deploy 25,000 Atlas humanoids inside U.S. plants, NVIDIA's Cadence simulation pact, and the just-signed NVIDIA-SK hynix memory partnership. The combined moves give NVIDIA a near-full-stack presence in Korea, from memory to chips, to platforms, to humanoid production.
Reporting based on coverage from UPI, Axios and TheNextWeb.