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Hyundai Motor Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, with primary operations in automobile manufacturing, robotics, autonomous driving, and advanced air mobility. The group is best known to general consumers for its automotive brands, Hyundai Motor Company, Kia Corporation, and Genesis, but in the context of artificial intelligence it is most relevant as the controlling owner of Boston Dynamics, the parent of the autonomous driving joint venture Motional, and one of the largest industrial customers for advanced robotics hardware in the world.
Under Executive Chair Chung Eui-sun, who took over the group in October 2020, Hyundai has reframed itself from a traditional automaker into what its leadership calls a "smart mobility solution provider" that produces software-defined vehicles, humanoid robots, robotaxis, and electric aircraft. The acquisition of Boston Dynamics from SoftBank in 2020 to 2021 placed Hyundai at the center of the global humanoid robot industry, and the group has since committed billions of dollars to integrate Boston Dynamics platforms (Atlas, Spot, and Stretch) directly into its own factories and into the broader logistics, construction, and industrial markets.
Hyundai Motor Group is the world's third-largest automaker by vehicles produced, behind only Toyota and Volkswagen, and reported global sales of 4,138,389 vehicles in 2025 with consolidated revenue of 186.3 trillion Korean won (roughly $130 billion). The group's growing investment in physical AI, factory automation, and autonomous mobility makes it one of the few automotive incumbents that is simultaneously a major buyer, builder, and integrator of robotics and AI systems at industrial scale.
Hyundai Motor Company was founded on December 29, 1967, in Seoul by Chung Ju-yung and his younger brother Chung Se-yung. Chung Ju-yung had already established Hyundai Engineering and Construction in 1947 and used the construction company's cash flow and management experience to launch the new automotive arm. The Ulsan assembly plant came online in 1968 and grew over the following decades into what is today the world's largest integrated automobile manufacturing facility, with annual capacity of about 1.6 million vehicles on a single site.
The Hyundai Pony, launched in 1976, became South Korea's first mass-produced, mass-exported passenger car. The Hyundai Excel followed in 1986 and broke into the United States market at low price points, beginning the company's climb up the global rankings. In 1998, after the Asian financial crisis, Hyundai Motor Company acquired a 51 percent stake in Kia, the second-largest South Korean carmaker. That deal converted Kia into a sister brand and is the foundational transaction behind today's Hyundai Motor Group.
Hyundai Motor Group is not a single legal entity. It is a chaebol-style conglomerate held together by a circular shareholding network among its main affiliates. Hyundai Motor Company owns about 34 percent of Kia, Kia in turn owns roughly 17 percent of Hyundai Mobis, and Hyundai Mobis owns about 21 percent of Hyundai Motor Company. This three-way circular structure allows the founding Chung family, which directly holds only a small fraction of any individual company, to retain control of the entire group. Other significant affiliates include Hyundai Steel, Hyundai Glovis (logistics), Hyundai WIA, Hyundai Capital, and Hyundai Engineering and Construction.
Chung Eui-sun is the current Executive Chair and CEO of Hyundai Motor Group. He is the only son of honorary chairman Chung Mong-koo and the grandson of founder Chung Ju-yung. Chung Eui-sun previously served as president of Kia Motors from 2005 to 2009, where he is widely credited with hiring German designer Peter Schreyer and overhauling the brand's design language. He became Executive Vice Chair in 2018 and was inaugurated as Chairman in October 2020. His tenure has been defined by an aggressive pivot toward electrification, software-defined vehicles, robotics, and autonomous driving.
Combined sales for Hyundai Motor Company alone reached 4,141,791 vehicles in 2024 and 4,138,389 vehicles in 2025. Group-wide sales including Kia and Genesis are larger and place the group consistently in third position globally. Annual revenue at Hyundai Motor Company hit a record 175.2 trillion won in 2024 and rose again to 186.3 trillion won in 2025, the company's sixth consecutive year of revenue growth.
Hyundai Motor Group's exposure to artificial intelligence is concentrated in a handful of subsidiaries and joint ventures that operate with significant independence from the core automotive business.
| Subsidiary or JV | Hyundai Stake | Founded or Acquired | Headquarters | Primary Focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boston Dynamics | 80 percent (Hyundai), 20 percent (SoftBank) | Acquired June 2021 | Waltham, Massachusetts | Humanoid and quadruped robotics, including Atlas, Spot, and Stretch |
| Motional | 50 percent (Hyundai), 50 percent (Aptiv, declining) | March 2020 | Boston, Massachusetts | SAE Level 4 autonomous driving, IONIQ 5 robotaxi |
| Supernal | 100 percent | Renamed November 2021 | Washington, D.C. | Advanced air mobility, S-A2 eVTOL aircraft |
| HMGICS (Innovation Center Singapore) | 100 percent | Opened November 2023 | Jurong Innovation District, Singapore | Cell-based EV manufacturing, humanoid integration, digital twin |
| Hyundai Mobis | 21 percent (held by HMC, with circular cross-holdings) | 1977 (as MoBis 1999) | Yongin, South Korea | ADAS, e-powertrain, in-vehicle software, Atlas actuators |
| Hyundai Robotics (HD Hyundai Robotics) | Spun out of HD Hyundai (separate group) | 1984 | Daegu, South Korea | Industrial robot arms, factory automation |
The two most important entities in this list, both from a public-attention standpoint and from an AI capability standpoint, are Boston Dynamics and Motional. Hyundai Robotics (legally part of HD Hyundai, a separate descendant of the original Hyundai conglomerate) is sometimes confused with Hyundai Motor Group's robotics activities, but the two operate independently.
Hyundai Motor Group announced its agreement to acquire a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank Group on December 11, 2020. The deal valued Boston Dynamics at $1.1 billion and gave Hyundai an 80 percent stake, with SoftBank retaining the remaining 20 percent through one of its affiliates. Hyundai Motor Group itself contributed 30 percent, Hyundai Mobis 20 percent, Hyundai Glovis 10 percent, and Chairman Chung Eui-sun personally invested 20 percent of the equity, an unusual arrangement that signaled how strategically the family viewed the deal. The acquisition closed on June 21, 2021, and Hyundai paid approximately $880 million in cash for the controlling interest.
Boston Dynamics had previously been owned by Google's parent Alphabet from 2013 to 2017 and then by SoftBank from 2017 to 2021. At the time of the Hyundai acquisition it was still primarily a research-driven organization with a single shipping commercial product, the Spot quadruped. Hyundai's stated rationale was that pairing Boston Dynamics' expertise in robot perception, navigation, and manipulation with Hyundai's manufacturing scale and global distribution would accelerate the commercialization of advanced robotics. CEO Robert Playter, formerly the company's COO, remained in his role.
Boston Dynamics ships three main commercial platforms:
On April 16, 2024, Boston Dynamics published a video titled "Farewell to HD Atlas" retiring the hydraulic Atlas after roughly a decade of research. The next day it published "All New Atlas," introducing an entirely new humanoid that replaced hydraulics with electric actuators throughout. The new platform stands about 1.9 meters tall, weighs about 90 kilograms, and is built specifically to enter productive industrial work rather than to serve as a research demonstrator. Hyundai was named as the launch customer, with deployment planned for the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America (HMGMA) electric vehicle plant in Bryan County, Georgia.
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Hyundai Motor Group conducted the first public live demonstration of the new Atlas. Boston Dynamics confirmed that all 2026 Atlas deployments were already committed, with fleets shipping to Hyundai's Robotics Metaplant Application Center (RMAC) and to Google DeepMind in the months following the show. The company stated that a product version of Atlas designed to assemble cars is in production, with full-scale deployment at HMGMA targeted by 2028.
A key element of the new Atlas is its custom electric actuator package, which is supplied by Hyundai Mobis. Mobis is Hyundai Motor Group's main parts and module supplier and is one of the larger automotive suppliers in the world by revenue. Mobis applies its automotive-grade volume manufacturing experience to actuators that historically were sourced from low-volume specialty robotics suppliers. Boston Dynamics has stated that the Mobis partnership lets it build a reliable component supply chain and accelerate actuator development at automotive scale, which is essential to reaching the production targets the group has announced.
Alongside the Atlas demonstrations at CES 2026, Boston Dynamics announced a research partnership with Google DeepMind to integrate DeepMind foundation models, including the Gemini Robotics family of vision-language-action models, onto the new Atlas platform. The collaboration is intended to give Atlas significantly stronger general cognitive and language understanding than purely task-trained robots, allowing it to interpret natural language instructions, reason about novel objects and scenes, and adapt to unfamiliar tasks without explicit retraining for each one.
In March 2025, Hyundai Motor Group announced a $21 billion investment in U.S. operations, of which about $6 billion is earmarked for innovation, supply chain expansion, and strategic partnerships including the purchase of "tens of thousands of robots" over the following years. The group has stated targets to build a robot manufacturing capacity of 30,000 humanoid units per year by 2028 to 2030, with output split among internal Hyundai use and external commercial customers. Total committed U.S. investment through 2028 was raised to $26 billion in subsequent announcements.
Hyundai's autonomous driving strategy is run primarily through Motional, a 50/50 joint venture originally formed with the supplier Aptiv. The two parents formed the joint venture in September 2019 with a combined valuation of approximately $4 billion. Hyundai contributed $1.6 billion in cash, $400 million in vehicle engineering services, R&D resources, and intellectual property access, while Aptiv contributed its autonomous driving business unit and roughly 700 employees. The deal closed in March 2020 and the new entity launched its public brand identity as Motional in August 2020.
Motional is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, with engineering operations in Pittsburgh and Singapore and operational centers in Las Vegas and Santa Monica. Its core technology stack inherits from nuTonomy, which Aptiv acquired in 2017. Motional has been progressively shifting toward end-to-end machine learning approaches, in which a single learned model maps from sensor inputs to trajectory outputs rather than a traditional pipeline of separate components.
Motional's primary product is the IONIQ 5 robotaxi, an autonomous version of Hyundai's E-GMP-based electric crossover. The vehicle is rated SAE Level 4 in the operational design domain in which it operates, meaning it can drive without a human driver as long as the conditions remain within its defined parameters. Each robotaxi is equipped with more than 30 sensors, combining cameras, radar, and lidar to provide 360-degree perception with long-range detection. The vehicle is one of the first Level 4 autonomous vehicles to be certified under U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).
Motional manufactures the IONIQ 5 robotaxi at Hyundai's Singapore Innovation Center (HMGICS), which serves as both an EV plant and an autonomous vehicle integration hub. Hyundai supplies the underlying vehicle, and Motional integrates the autonomous driving compute, sensors, and software stack into each unit.
Motional has run pilot robotaxi services in Las Vegas since 2018, initially using Chrysler Pacifica vans inherited from the nuTonomy program and later transitioning to IONIQ 5 vehicles. The pilots have included partnerships with Lyft, Uber, and Via. In May 2024, Motional restructured, cut roughly 40 percent of its staff, and pushed its planned driverless commercial launch from 2024 to late 2026. The restructuring reflected both general industry pressure on autonomous vehicle developers and Aptiv's decision to step back from further capital investment.
In February 2024, Aptiv announced that it would not provide additional capital to Motional and would convert a portion of its common equity into preferred shares, reducing its effective common voting interest. Hyundai Motor Group committed an additional $923 million in May 2024 to keep the JV funded. Aptiv's effective common interest is set to fall to roughly 15 percent while Hyundai's rises correspondingly.
In early 2026, Motional and Uber announced that the IONIQ 5 robotaxi would re-enter the Las Vegas Uber network, initially with safety operators on board, with the goal of operating fully driverless by the end of 2026. Designated pickup and dropoff zones at launch include Resorts World Las Vegas, Encore at Wynn Las Vegas, the Westgate Las Vegas Resort, downtown Las Vegas, and Town Square near the airport.
| Program | Lead Entity | Vehicle Platform | Autonomy Level | Status (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONIQ 5 robotaxi (Las Vegas) | Motional | Hyundai IONIQ 5 | SAE Level 4 | Commercial pilot with Uber, safety operator onboard |
| Highway Driving Pilot (HDP) | Hyundai Motor Company / Mobis | Genesis G90, EV9 | SAE Level 3 (limited) | Limited rollout in South Korea |
| Highway Driving Assist 2 (HDA2) | Hyundai Mobis | Hyundai, Kia, Genesis | SAE Level 2+ | Standard on most premium and EV models |
| Remote Smart Parking Assist 2 | Hyundai Mobis | Multiple Hyundai/Kia/Genesis | SAE Level 2 (parking) | Available across global markets |
| NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion stack | Hyundai/Kia + NVIDIA | Future Hyundai/Kia EVs | Scalable Level 2 to Level 4 | Announced March 2026, in development |
Hyundai Mobis is the largest dedicated parts and module supplier in the Hyundai ecosystem, ranking among the top ten global automotive suppliers by revenue. Its product range covers chassis modules, cockpit modules, e-powertrain components, infotainment systems, and an expanding portfolio of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Mobis is the supplier behind almost every ADAS feature on Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis vehicles sold worldwide.
In January 2025, Mobis and Qualcomm announced a long-term partnership to deliver an end-to-end ADAS and digital cockpit platform built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC. The collaboration is intended to scale across vehicle classes and support over-the-air upgrades. Mobis is concurrently building a holographic windshield display (HWD) with Zeiss, targeting start of production in 2029. Mobis has stated that all Hyundai models will be available with SAE Level 2 ADAS as standard or option, and Level 3 highway driving on select premium models, by 2025.
Mobis is the sole actuator supplier for the new electric Boston Dynamics Atlas. This is one of the clearest examples of intra-group synergy enabled by Hyundai's ownership of Boston Dynamics, applying Mobis's volume manufacturing and quality control to a robot subsystem that historically was hand-built in low volumes.
Hyundai Motor Group has reorganized its global manufacturing program around what it calls "physical AI," a strategy that pairs software-defined vehicles, AI factories, and humanoid and quadruped robots into a single integrated production system.
The Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore (HMGICS) opened in November 2023 in the Jurong Innovation District. The seven-story, 86,900-square-meter facility is Hyundai's first cell-based EV plant, replacing the traditional moving assembly line with reconfigurable manufacturing cells served by autonomous mobile robots. Approximately 50 percent of all manufacturing tasks at HMGICS are performed by some 200 robots, including Boston Dynamics platforms, with about 68 percent logistics automation and 67 percent manufacturing automation. The facility is built around a digital twin that mirrors every machine and process in real time, allowing operators and engineers to monitor and optimize the plant from anywhere in the world.
HMGICS produces the IONIQ 5, the IONIQ 5 N, and the Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi, with annual capacity of approximately 30,000 EVs per year. The center also serves as a customer experience hub, with rooftop test track and on-site delivery facilities, and as a research site for new manufacturing technologies that are then exported to the rest of Hyundai's global plant network.
HMGMA is Hyundai's flagship North American EV plant, located in Bryan County near Savannah, Georgia. The plant broke ground in October 2022 with an initial budget of $5.54 billion and reached full operations in 2025 at a final cost of approximately $7.59 billion. HMGMA has annual capacity of up to 500,000 EVs and hybrids and employs more than 8,500 workers across the megasite.
The plant is designed as a showcase for Hyundai's E-FOREST smart factory platform. It uses private 5G networks to connect more than 850 industrial robots and almost 300 automated guided vehicles (AGVs) with AI vision systems for quality inspection and predictive maintenance algorithms running across the production floor. Each vehicle benefits from at least 23 distinct AI or robotic systems during the build process. HMGMA is also designated as the production deployment site for Boston Dynamics Atlas, with humanoid units scheduled to enter assembly work by 2028.
E-FOREST is Hyundai's umbrella brand for its smart factory technology stack, originally piloted in Korea and now being globalized. The technologies showcased at HMGMA in Georgia and HMGICS in Singapore are migrating back to legacy plants such as the giant Ulsan complex, where Hyundai is rebuilding sections of the production line around digital twin operating systems, autonomous mobile logistics robots, and Boston Dynamics platforms for inspection and material handling.
In 2026, Hyundai began building the Robotics Metaplant Application Center, a dedicated facility for integrating Boston Dynamics platforms into automotive manufacturing workflows. RMAC is one of the two initial customers for the new electric Atlas (alongside Google DeepMind) and will serve as the deployment proving ground for humanoid manufacturing tasks before the technology is rolled out to full assembly plants like HMGMA.
Under Chairman Chung Eui-sun, Hyundai has committed to becoming a leader in software-defined vehicles (SDVs), a category in which the vehicle's behavior is determined primarily by software that can be updated continuously over the air. In March 2025, at a closed-door town hall at the group's Advanced Vehicle Platform (AVP) headquarters in Pangyo, South Korea, Chung set a public target of overtaking Tesla in SDV technology by 2028. The group has committed approximately 18 trillion won (about $12.4 billion) of SDV-related R&D spending through 2030.
SDV development is closely tied to robotics and physical AI in Chung's strategy. The same compute platform, AI models, sensor stack, and software development kit that runs an autonomous vehicle in the field can be reused, with adaptation, in a humanoid robot working in a factory or in an air taxi flown by Supernal. Chung has emphasized that Hyundai must develop deep in-house competence rather than rely on external suppliers, while still partnering broadly where appropriate.
In October 2025, Hyundai and NVIDIA announced a multi-year strategic partnership to build an AI factory based on 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. The Blackwell-based AI factory will train autonomous driving models, run simulation, support digital twin operations, and serve as the backbone for foundational model development across the group. The partnership covers four pillars: in-vehicle AI, autonomous driving, factory automation, and robotics.
In March 2026, Hyundai and Kia expanded the NVIDIA partnership specifically for next-generation autonomous driving. The expanded agreement is built on the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion reference platform and NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor in-vehicle compute, with target capability scaling from SAE Level 2 driver assistance to SAE Level 4 autonomy. NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor functions as the in-vehicle "AI brain," running the safety-certified DriveOS operating system on a Blackwell-class automotive SoC.
Hyundai entered the urban air mobility business with an internal Urban Air Mobility (UAM) division in 2019, led by former NASA aeronautics director Jaiwon Shin. The division was reorganized as a standalone subsidiary named Supernal in November 2021, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hyundai allocated approximately $6 billion to Supernal at launch.
Supernal's flagship vehicle is the S-A2, a five-seat electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft unveiled at CES 2024. The S-A2 has a cruise speed of 120 miles per hour, an initial range of about 60 miles, and eight tilting electric rotors. Supernal aims for entry into commercial service in 2028, with prototype testing in 2026. Supernal's progress in 2025 was disrupted by the resignations of its CEO and CTO and a subsequent operational pause, although Hyundai has stated continued support for the program.
Hyundai Motor Group's stated strategy combines electric mobility, software-defined vehicles, and physical AI on overlapping timelines. The roadmap below is drawn from the group's CES 2026 announcements, its 2025 and 2026 annual business reports, and Chairman Chung's March 2025 town hall on SDVs.
| Year | Electric Vehicles | Robotics | Autonomous Driving | Manufacturing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | All-electric Atlas reveal at HMGMA launch site | New electric Atlas unveiled (April 2024) | Motional restructures, robotaxi launch delayed to 2026 | HMGMA approaches full production |
| 2025 | EV portfolio expanded across markets | $21B U.S. investment commitment, $6B for innovation and robots | Hyundai injects $923M into Motional | E-FOREST scaled across Ulsan and global plants |
| 2026 | Sustained 4M+ unit annual sales target | First Atlas units shipped to RMAC and Google DeepMind | IONIQ 5 robotaxi returns to Uber Las Vegas; NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion stack expanded | RMAC opens for humanoid integration |
| 2027 | Continued EV scaling | Atlas pilot deployments expand within Hyundai plants | Motional removes safety operator, expands operational design domain | Additional E-FOREST plants come online globally |
| 2028 | Target: lead Tesla in SDV technology | Atlas in volume manufacturing use at HMGMA in Georgia | Supernal targets eVTOL commercial entry | Robot manufacturing capacity scaling toward 30,000 units per year |
| 2030 | $26B U.S. investment fully deployed | Annual humanoid production capacity of 30,000 units | Group-wide Level 2 to Level 4 ADAS coverage | E-FOREST and digital twin standard across all plants |
The roadmap is unusually aggressive for an automotive incumbent and reflects Chung Eui-sun's belief that the next era of mobility will be defined by software, AI, and humanoid labor as much as by vehicles themselves. Hyundai is one of the very few automakers that has both the capital and the in-house robotics expertise (via Boston Dynamics) to execute this kind of plan, and the next several years will determine how much of the roadmap converts into real product.
Hyundai's significance in the AI industry is largely indirect but very large. Through its 80 percent ownership of Boston Dynamics, the group controls one of the three or four most advanced humanoid robotics programs in the world, alongside Tesla's Optimus and Figure AI's Figure 02 and 03. Through Motional, Hyundai is one of the few remaining major-OEM-backed Level 4 robotaxi programs after the closure of GM Cruise and the retreats of Ford and Volkswagen from Argo AI. Through Hyundai Mobis, the group manufactures the actuators that power the new electric Atlas at automotive scale, a critical enabler for any humanoid robotics company that wants to ship hardware in the tens of thousands of units per year.
Hyundai's role as an industrial customer is just as important. By committing publicly to integrate Atlas into its own electric vehicle plants, the group provides Boston Dynamics with a built-in volume customer, which de-risks the transition from research demonstrations to deployable industrial product. The combined Hyundai, Boston Dynamics, Mobis, and DeepMind stack of factory integrator, robot maker, actuator supplier, and foundation model provider is one of the most vertically integrated AI robotics value chains assembled by any company group.
Hyundai is also an unusually visible bellwether for the convergence between automotive and AI. The same compute hardware, sensor suites, and AI models can be reused across cars, robotaxis, humanoids, and air taxis. Hyundai is one of the few companies actively building products in all four of those categories at the same time.