LG and NVIDIA said on 14 August they are jointly developing a next-generation bipedal humanoid, to be unveiled in the first quarter of 2027. LG Electronics, LG Innotek and LG Energy Solution contribute the actuators, sensors and batteries. NVIDIA contributes the rest: Isaac GR00T as the foundation model behind the robot’s reasoning and control, Jetson Thor for onboard compute, and Halos for Robotics as the safety layer. The stated targets are manufacturing, commercial spaces and homes.
The division of labour is the story. LG supplies the components it already manufactures at scale, and NVIDIA supplies the parts nobody has commoditised yet. That split is becoming the default shape of the humanoid business, and it means the thing separating one company’s robot from another’s is increasingly not the robot.
The nearer-term commitments are more concrete than the humanoid. LG CLOiD, a wheel-based machine, goes into a washing machine plant in Tennessee before the end of 2026, and the companies plan an 80 MW AI factory in Cheonan by the first half of 2028. A joint task force covers R&D, site validation and commercialisation. Jensen Huang framed the arrangement as pairing LG’s product engineering and manufacturing with NVIDIA technology.
What is absent is the robot. It has no name, no published specifications, no price and no production timeline, and the unveiling is two quarters out. At this stage an announcement is a commitment to build rather than evidence of having built, and the sector’s record this year is that the wheeled machine shipping quietly into a factory tends to do more actual work than the bipedal one in the press release.
