Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung took the stage at the San Francisco AI Summit on July 25 to declare the group's evolution "beyond the traditional boundaries of automotive manufacturing" into a Physical AI solution company — laying out a roadmap that runs from intelligent vehicles and robots to AI factories and, ultimately, city-scale intelligence. The event gathered roughly 150 attendees, including Korean business leaders, U.S. tech executives, startups and students.
Devices, Spaces, Then Cities
Chung framed Physical AI as a three-layer progression. It begins with intelligent devices — vehicles and robots enhanced by AI — expands to intelligent spaces such as AI Defined Factories where AI autonomously integrates logistics, production and quality management, and culminates in city-level integrated intelligence, where energy, mobility and robotics infrastructure is connected and optimized in real time.
The group's differentiator, Chung argued, is a data flywheel: data generated across manufacturing operations, vehicles, logistics systems and robotics demonstrations continuously improves AI models, whose gains are reapplied to real-world operations. The robotics pillar rests on Boston Dynamics — Spot, Stretch and the Atlas humanoid — plus the group Robotics LAB's MobED platform.
NVIDIA Robot Reference Platform, Waymo, Google DeepMind
The partnership stack is substantial. With NVIDIA, Hyundai is expanding collaboration on Physical AI infrastructure — building on a supply agreement for 50,000 Blackwell GPUs — and the two will co-develop a Robot Reference Platform providing standardized research robot hardware and software to universities, institutes and startups. A Hyundai Motor Group Robot Application Center and NVIDIA AI Technology Center collaborations are also in motion, alongside digital-twin factory work and autonomous driving integration.
With Waymo, the group will produce autonomous-ready IONIQ 5 vehicles at its Georgia Metaplant (HMGMA). And Boston Dynamics' strategic partnership with Google DeepMind targets next-generation humanoid intelligence, with Atlas to be deployed first at group production facilities. Hyundai also reaffirmed plans for a U.S. robot production facility with annual capacity of up to 30,000 units by 2028.
Saemangeum AI Valley and a KRW 42 Trillion Domestic Bet
Domestically, the group is developing the Saemangeum AI Valley in Jeonbuk State — an approximately KRW 9 trillion (~$6.2 billion) investment spanning AI data centers, a robotics manufacturing cluster, electrolyzer plants and AI hydrogen city infrastructure. Notably, the robotics cluster will operate partly as a robotics foundry, offering manufacturing services to SMEs that lack production expertise. A further KRW 42 trillion over the next decade will fund advanced industry hubs in Korea's Yeongnam region.
The message to the industry: the race for Physical AI is no longer a startup-versus-startup contest. A top-three global automaker is now organizing its entire manufacturing, robotics and data estate around embodied intelligence — and building the reference platforms and foundry capacity to pull an ecosystem along with it.
