Hyundai Motor Group will build a robot production facility in the US with annual capacity of up to 30,000 units by 2028, Executive Chair Euisun Chung told the San Francisco AI Summit on 24 July 2026. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid will be deployed first at the group’s Metaplant America site in Georgia.

The plant rests on a claim that manufacturing scale, rather than algorithms alone, will decide who leads in robotics. Hyundai is extending its work with Nvidia beyond an existing supply agreement for 50,000 Blackwell graphics processing units, and the pair will co-develop a robot reference platform supplying research models to universities, research institutes and startups.

Autonomous-ready Ioniq 5 vehicles will be built at Metaplant America under the group’s partnership with Waymo, while Boston Dynamics pursues humanoid autonomy with Google DeepMind. The spread of partners shows how much of the critical software layer Hyundai is now sourcing outside its own walls.

At home, the group is putting about KRW 9tr (US$6.12bn) into the Saemangeum AI Valley, covering data centres, a robotics cluster and electrolyser plants, and a further KRW 42tr (US$28.56bn) over the next decade into the Yeongnam region. In a statement, Chung said: “Hyundai Motor Group is evolving beyond the traditional boundaries of automotive manufacturing by expanding into autonomous driving, robotics and AI-defined factories, accelerating our transformation into a physical AI solution company.”

Why this matters:

• The Waymo partnership producing IONIQ 5 vehicles at HMGMA is the most concrete near-term commitment.Autonomous-ready modifications at a US manufacturing facility ties Hyundai directly into Waymo’s hardware supply chain. This relationship will likely become more valuable as Waymo scales toward its next vehicle generation and needs a manufacturing partner with proven volume capability.
• 30,000 Atlas units annually by 2028 is an ambitious production target.Before it was acquired in full by Hyundai, Boston Dynamics had historically been a low-volume, high-cost robotics company. Establishing a US facility at the scale alluded to by Hyundai would represent a fundamental shift in its business model, and whether the Google DeepMind partnership can deliver the AI capabilities needed to make Atlas commercially viable at volume remains the central question.
• The data flywheel framing is the strategic logic that ties everything together.Manufacturing, vehicles, logistics, and robotics all generate real-world operational data; feeding that back into AI model development creates a compounding advantage that purely software-focused competitors cannot easily replicate—and it is the most defensible answer Hyundai has to the question of why an automaker should be a Physical AI company at all.