Samsung Electronics (005930) is accelerating in-house development of humanoid robots on an internal assessment that advances in artificial intelligence and the commercialization of physical AI are arriving faster than expected, according to industry sources. Domestic rivals are moving as well: Hyundai Motor (005380) Group has unveiled a new Atlas, and LG Group has introduced Cloi'd, both positioning to claim the humanoid market early. Chinese companies, meanwhile, are scaling up humanoids at a formidable pace in the global market. To counter rivals' speed and volume, Samsung has set a goal of internalizing everything from product design to the AI brain and seizing leadership of the humanoid industry ecosystem at a stroke.
Samsung's push shows first in an unconventional organizational setup. In the Robotics (RX) Business Promotion Office created in July, Yoon Jang-hyun, president and chief technology officer of the Device eXperience (DX) division, concurrently heads both the hardware development team and the AI software development team. It is unusual at a large corporation for a single executive to oversee both the hardware organization handling robot drivetrains and the AI organization building perception and autonomous navigation.
The industry reads this as shifting the lead in robot development from hardware to AI and software. The old approach of building a mechanical frame first and layering software on top cannot keep up with AI advances that change by the day. Executives therefore appear to have given Yoon, a software specialist, full authority over development to build a custom humanoid optimized for AI algorithms from the initial design stage, sharply shortening the development period and raising the level of completion. The aim is to eliminate the development gap between the brain and the body and bring out a product at commercial readiness right away.
Samsung has been methodically securing core technologies and trademarks for its own robots for years. On trademarks, it filed early for "SAMSUNG BOT" in 2022 to lock in rights. That led the industry to expect Samsung Bot would be the name of the company's next-generation robot brand.
The company also filed in 2024 for humanoid hip joint design technology, which determines the success of bipedal walking, securing its own lower-body structure. In April this year, it registered a next-generation robot hand patent in the United States that combines camera vision to flexibly rearrange finger configurations according to the shape of an object. Adding language-model control technology that converts natural-language instructions into physical motion completed the technical puzzle.
A dual research structure linking the R&D campus in Umyeon-dong, Seoul, with the Gumi plant in North Gyeongsang Province is seen as a distinctive Samsung strength. At the Umyeon-dong campus, Samsung Electronics is demonstrating core brain technologies such as visual recognition and precision control for humanoids and refining them. Technology developed there is applied directly to a "data factory" under construction at sites including the Gumi plant for validation.
For robots to work adeptly in the physical world, vast amounts of physical data are needed. Samsung, which operates semiconductor, smartphone and home appliance production lines around the world, can use its own factories as a huge data collection base. That is an overwhelming comparative advantage that global big tech firms relying on laboratory simulations would find hard to match in a short time.
Samsung Electronics is moving quickly on robots because the global robot market is growing rapidly. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global humanoid market is projected to expand from 6.6 trillion won in 2025 to 222.4 trillion won in 2034. It has emerged from a niche into a vast market that could decide the fate of future manufacturing.
China has taken early leadership in this fast-growing robot market. According to market research firm Smart Analytics Global, global humanoid shipments reached 19,100 units in the first half of this year, a 272% surge from a year earlier. Strikingly, Chinese companies accounted for more than 97% of global shipments in the period. Agibot led with 8,400 units delivered in the first half for a 44% global share, followed by Unitree at 31%, Galbot at 5%, UBTech at 4% and LEJU at 3%.
Chinese robots are seen as having moved past simple proof-of-concept work into mass production, deployed directly on automobile assembly and parts production lines. Smart Analytics Global estimated that more than 70% of first-half humanoid shipments went into industrial and commercial use.
Many analysts say the recent tightening of U.S. restrictions on imports of Chinese products is a decisive opportunity for Samsung and other Korean companies. The United States and its allies all need a new robot supply chain free of security risks, and Samsung, Hyundai Motor and LG Electronics (066570), with world-class manufacturing competitiveness, could stand out as the best partners to fill it.
An industry official said the landscape once split between the United States and China will be shaken as Samsung, a dominant force in IT manufacturing, enters the humanoid market in earnest, adding that the CES stage in January next year will be the first turning point at which the AI-humanoid-smart home ecosystem Samsung envisions takes concrete form.
