LG will unveil a bipedal humanoid in Q1 2027, built on NVIDIA’s Isaac GR00T

LG said on August 14, 2026 that it is developing a next-generation bipedal humanoid built using NVIDIA Isaac GR00T, NVIDIA’s open humanoid foundation model, and is targeting a public unveiling in the first quarter of 2027. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding on August 13 at NVIDIA’s headquarters in Santa Clara, with LG Corp Chairman and CEO Kwang Mo Koo and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang in attendance.

The robot runs Jetson Thor for onboard compute, reasoning and control, and uses NVIDIA Halos for Robotics for safety. LG says it will bring together “One LG” capabilities across LG Electronics, LG Innotek and LG Energy Solution — actuators, sensors and batteries.

A named production line, this year

The nearer-term commitment is more concrete than the humanoid. Within 2026, LG will deploy CLOiD, a wheel-based robot, to LG Electronics’ washing machine manufacturing line in Tennessee for validation in a real production environment. Based on those results, LG says it will refine performance and utility and expand deployment to global production facilities, homes and commercial spaces.

That is a specific factory, a specific product line and a specific year. Very little humanoid-adjacent announcement carries all three.

Renting the brain while owning the body and the data

The most revealing line in the announcement is about LG’s own model. The robot data and manufacturing-site validation experience from this collaboration will feed LG’s in-house Robot Foundation Model, currently under development. LG says it plans to actively use Isaac GR00T while continuing to advance its own AI model capabilities.

Read plainly: LG will ship on NVIDIA’s foundation model while building the replacement, and the deployment is partly a data-collection exercise for the replacement. That is the same structure most large manufacturers are landing on — rent the brain, own the body, keep the data — and it is why the Tennessee line matters more than the Q1 2027 reveal.

The rest of the agreement

Beyond robotics, LG plans an AI factory reference site powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin in the first half of 2027, and an 80 MW LG AI Factory in Cheonan, Chungcheongnam-do by the first half of 2028, to advance physical AI and its robot foundation models. On mobility, LG will develop a high-performance computing platform for AI-defined vehicles built on NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion, extending its in-vehicle infotainment business into autonomous driving.

Why it matters

LG put robotics under the CEO and started building a training-data factory in July. What was missing was a date and a customer. It now has both, and the customer is itself — which is the fastest way to get a robot into a real production environment without a sales cycle.

The competitive read is domestic. Samsung set up its CEO-led RX robotics division in July with no public unveiling date attached. LG has now put Q1 2027 on the record. Whatever Samsung shows next has a published comparison to land against, and both companies are drawing on the same Korean component base that our Korea index tracks.

Koo framed it as execution: “As our discussions have moved fast, our tasks and goals in AI Factory and Physical AI have become clear. We will accelerate the spread of AI by building industry-leading references.” The word doing the work there is references — sites other buyers can be walked through. That is a sales strategy, not a research one.