If you were wondering where some of the funds the South Korean government has allocated for AI and robotics are going, LG is one of its first stops. So is Nvidia, like the company needs the cash injection. Both companies have announced a partnership that will “accelerate LG Group’s next wave of AI-driven businesses, spanning robotics, autonomous driving, data center technologies and GPU cloud services.”
Which, handily, also gives us some idea of where the lately-stricken South Korean company is headed. It has been trying its hand at various industries, mostly by placing its manufacturing into unusual supply chains. Now, it seems, there’s a more solid pivot coming.
LG ‘bots up
That pivot will involve humanoid(ish) robots, coupled with what Nvidia calls physical AI. That means sticking an AI system into something that can move and navigate on its own. You know, the thing pretty much all twentieth-century science fiction warned us about?
According to Nvidia, LG’s project will create “an autonomous manufacturing ecosystem in which the entire process — from raw material procurement to production, logistics and customer delivery — is connected in real time through data and AI, and establish it as a new global smart factory standard.” So… a factory staffed by robots and monitored by AI. And occasionally humans. There’s no way this isn’t being pulled off, obviously.
The project, the Robotics Business Center, will be based in Seoul. It’ll incorporate Nvidia’s Isaac robotics tech, including Sim, Lab, and the greater GROOT vision action language model as part of its creations. Other areas LG will target are autonomous driving (using Nvidia’s DRIVE platform), as well as South Korea’s EXAONE sovereign AI.
The latter will involve “exploring broader adoption of EXAONE and agentic AI technologies across its businesses through platforms such as ChatEXAONE — LG Group’s EXAONE-based enterprise chatbot service.”
It looks as though South Korean companies in general are leaning hard into AI and robotics development. Whether this will end badly for the country and companies involved depends on how violently the AI bubble bursts.
