NVIDIA Says Golden Age of Physical AI Has Arrived, Partners With South Korean Firms Including Samsung and Hyundai

According to TechFlow, on November 9, Yonhap News Agency reported that NVIDIA announced at the “NVIDIA AI DAY 2026” opening at COEX in the Gangnam district of Seoul that the golden age of Physical AI has arrived. Deepu Talla, Vice President of Robotics and Edge AI, stated that Agent AI capable of autonomous judgment and action is accelerating robot development and deployment, and AI taking the physical world as its stage will lead the next transformation wave. Talla summarized robot development as a “three-computer” problem: using DGX to train models, RTX to simulate in virtual environments, and Jetson to run in real-time on physical robots. The supporting Omniverse platform is used to build digital twins, alongside the world foundation model Cosmos, the humanoid robot platform GR00T, and the Isaac development framework, all designed to allow enterprises to retain their proprietary data and intellectual property through an open model approach. He pointed out that two-thirds of global GDP occurs in the physical world, but manufacturing automation over the past 50 years has only covered high-volume, low-variety production lines, leaving the 90% of SMEs that form the main body of manufacturing without accessible technology for a long time. In Korean partnerships, Hyundai Motor Group uses digital twins to train robots, with simulation iteration speeds tens of thousands of times faster than real time; Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix use Omniverse to build digital twins for semiconductor factories for equipment and process monitoring, as well as standard operating procedure analysis. Samsung has also introduced cuISS, cuDSS, and GPU acceleration in stages such as TCAD, and uses PhysicsNeMo to analyze the thermal and mechanical characteristics of chips. One “AI homogenization” case compressed simulations that previously took about 18 hours down to 41 seconds, speeding up by approximately 1,600 times; LG Electronics’ CLOiD robot completed a picking and transporting demonstration after being trained with GR00T. NVIDIA also announced a partnership with Kakao Mobility to develop Level 4 autonomous driving, combining the vehicle computing platform Hyperion with Halos safety validation technology, initially focusing primarily on Kia PBV models.