Hyundai brings Google into humanoids

Hyundai bets on Google for humanoids

Hyundai is stacking partners around robots.

Hyundai Motor Group announced a partnership between Boston Dynamics and Google to develop AI-based humanoid robots for manufacturing. Boston Dynamics will use Google DeepMind’s foundation models, while Hyundai plans to scale production to 30,000 robots a year by 2028 and open a U.S. robotics training center later this year.

This looks like Hyundai hedging its bets across the AI stack. After teaming up with Nvidia on physical AI last year, it is now pulling in Google for brains, while keeping Boston Dynamics as the body builder.

If this works, Hyundai could control both how robots are trained and where they get deployed, starting on its own factory floors. The risk is complexity, since coordinating Nvidia, Google, and in-house teams is harder than betting on a single platform.

When carmakers start treating robots like vehicles, who ends up as the Toyota of humanoids?

Alexa steps out of the kitchen

Amazon just gave Alexa a URL.

At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Amazon launched Alexa. com for Alexa+ Early Access users, letting people chat with Alexa in a browser the same way they use ChatGPT or Gemini. This matters because Amazon has sold more than 600 million Alexa devices, but voice-only assistants have stalled, and the company wants Alexa on phones, screens, and laptops.

This feels like Amazon admitting that smart speakers alone were a dead end. The interesting part is not the chatbot interface, but the push to make Alexa a family control center, calendars, groceries, recipes, smart lights, all tied to one Amazon account.

Amazon says people with Alexa+ are shopping three times more and using recipes five times more, which explains the urgency. The risk is trust, since Amazon is asking users to upload emails, documents, and schedules without owning a full productivity suite like Google does.

If Alexa becomes your household’s shared brain, who actually controls it when something goes wrong?

Nvidia is standardizing robots

Nvidia is not pitching a robot. It is pitching the stack.

At CES 2026, Nvidia rolled out new robot foundation models, simulation tools, and a Jetson Thor T4000 chip, aiming to become the default platform for generalist robotics. The company says this full system, models, simulators, and edge compute, is how robots move from narrow demos to real-world work.

This looks less like a moonshot and more like infrastructure building. Nvidia is betting that robotics is about tooling and standards, and that whoever owns those layers quietly controls what gets built.

The numbers explain the confidence: robotics is the fastest-growing category on Hugging Face, and Nvidia’s models lead downloads there. With partners like Boston Dynamics and Caterpillar already onboard, smaller robotics teams may feel pressure to build on Nvidia just to keep up.

If Nvidia becomes unavoidable in robotics, does innovation speed up, or narrow to whatever its stack supports first?

Prohuman team

Free Guides

Explore our free guides and products to get into AI and master it.

All of them are free to access and would stay free for you.

Feeling generous?

You know someone who loves breakthroughs as much as you do.

Share The Prohuman it’s how smart people stay one update ahead.