"Incredible."
Madison Huang, the eldest daughter of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and senior director of product and technology marketing for Nvidia's physical artificial intelligence (AI) platform, said this after touring the data factory under construction at the LG Electronics research and development (R&D) campus in Yangjae, Seocho-gu, Seoul, on the morning of the 18th. Huang, who entered at about 8:40 a.m. and left at about 11:12 a.m., stayed about 32 minutes longer than the roughly two-hour schedule initially planned.
After leaving the data factory building, Huang got into a black Hyundai Motor Palisade while holding in her right hand a shopping bag printed with the phrase "LIFE'S GOOD." When asked by reporters, "How do you feel after touring the data factory today?", she lowered the window and said, "Incredible." She then waved to the reporters and gave a thumbs-up with one hand.
The data factory Huang visited that day is a core physical AI facility set up inside LG Electronics' Yangjae campus, its R&D hub. It is a kind of "robot training center" that secures motion and task data performed by robots in environments similar to homes or factories, and has AI train and validate on it. LG and Nvidia plan to build a physical AI data factory that repeats data collection and generation, training, and validation, and to use the secured data to further advance LG's in-house Robot Foundation Model (RFM).
"Incredible" is also an expression the Huang family often uses when giving positive assessments. Jensen Huang, during a visit to Korea in June, referred to cooperation with domestic corporations and said it had been an "incredible year."
Huang's visit shows that the physical AI cooperation direction set by the top leadership of both companies is leading to working-level consultations at actual development sites. At Nvidia, Huang is in charge of product and technology marketing for physical AI platforms including Omniverse, Cosmos, Isaac, and Isaac GR00T for Humanoid Robot.
LG Electronics and Nvidia are making their physical AI cooperation concrete at the actual robot development stage. Targeting a public reveal in the first quarter of next year, LG Electronics is developing a bipedal humanoid robot using Nvidia's robotics computing platform Jetson Thor, the humanoid foundation model Isaac GR00T, and the robot safety system Helios for Robotics. It will also combine affiliate technologies such as LG Electronics' actuators, LG Innotek sensors, and LG Energy Solution batteries.
LG Electronics and Nvidia have decided to cooperate from research and development (R&D) to field validation and commercialization by operating a joint task force (TF) made up of technical and business experts. Within this year, they plan to deploy the wheel-based Humanoid Robot "LG CLOiD" to LG Electronics' washing machine production line in Tennessee in the United States to conduct validation in a real manufacturing environment.
Earlier, LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo and CEO Jensen Huang met at Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on the 13th and signed a strategic business cooperation memorandum of understanding (MOU). The two companies set robots, AI factories, and mobility as the three main cooperation areas. Huang's visit to the Yangjae data factory came five days after the top executives of both companies agreed to expand cooperation.