LG is building a humanoid robot, and it is borrowing Nvidia’s brain to do it. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding at Nvidia’s Santa Clara headquarters to develop a bipedal robot, one that walks on two legs rather than rolling on wheels, and the agreement matters because it pairs a company with genuine manufacturing depth against the software layer that is quietly becoming standard across the humanoid industry.
The division of labor is the clearest way to understand the deal, since Nvidia supplies the intelligence and LG supplies the body. The robot will be built on Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T, the company’s open foundation model for humanoids, with a Jetson Thor computer handling the onboard reasoning and control that lets a machine react in real time, and Nvidia’s Halos system layered in for safety. That software stack has already drawn in a long list of robot builders, and LG is now among the largest to commit to it.
What LG brings is the harder half of a humanoid to get right, the physical hardware, and here the company is pooling capabilities from across its subsidiaries under a banner it calls One LG. That means actuators, the motors that move a robot’s joints, from LG Electronics, sensors from LG Innotek, and batteries from LG Energy Solution, three pieces that together make up much of what determines whether a humanoid can move smoothly and last through a working shift. Few of LG’s rivals in this space can supply all three from inside the same corporate family.
The signing itself carried some weight, with LG Corp chairman and chief executive Kwang Mo Koo putting his name to the agreement alongside Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang, and the partnership reaches beyond the robot to cover AI factories and mobility as well, turning what began as a June handshake into a broader roadmap. The public unveiling of the humanoid is planned for the first quarter of 2027, which places LG’s ambitions on a concrete timeline rather than leaving them as a statement of intent.
Before that reveal, LG plans a more modest but telling step, deploying its wheeled CLOiD robot to an LG Electronics washing machine plant in Tennessee within 2026 to prove out its robotics on a real production line rather than in a demo. That mix of a grounded near term deployment and a headline humanoid due in 2027 is a sensible way to enter a field that has produced far more dramatic videos than dependable working robots, and it sets up a real test of whether a manufacturing giant with Nvidia’s software behind it can turn the promise of humanoids into machines that actually earn their keep. The robot most worth watching is not the one on this year’s stage but the one LG shows in 2027.
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