Nvidia says the golden age of physical AI has arrived, partners with Korean companies such as Samsung and Hyundai

NVIDIA declared at its AI Day 2026 event in Seoul that the "golden age" of physical AI has arrived, unveiling a robotics stack spanning DGX training, RTX simulation, Jetson edge deployment, Omniverse digital twins, the Cosmos world foundation model, the GR00T humanoid platform and the Isaac framework, offered as open models so enterprises retain their data and IP. The company disclosed Korean partnerships: Hyundai is training robots in digital twins that iterate hundreds of thousands of times faster than real time; Samsung and SK Hynix are building semiconductor fab digital twins in Omniverse, with one Samsung "AI homogenization" case cutting a simulation from roughly 18 hours to 41 seconds, about a 1,600x speedup; and LG's CLOiD robot completed a pick-and-place demo after GR00T training. NVIDIA also said it will co-develop L4 autonomous driving with Kakao Mobility using its Hyperion in-vehicle compute platform and Halos safety validation, starting with Kia PBV models. The push matters because NVIDIA argues two-thirds of global GDP is generated in the physical world while 50 years of manufacturing automation has reached only high-volume, low-mix lines, leaving the 90% of manufacturers that are SMEs underserved. Next to watch is how quickly these Korean deployments move from digital-twin pilots to production, and whether the open-model approach draws further industrial customers.