Korea Advances Physical AI Across Industries With NVIDIA

NVIDIA says it is working with major South Korean companies to move physical AI, meaning AI applied to machines and industrial processes, from development into production. In a post dated November 8, 2026, the company outlined projects with Samsung Electronics, Kakao Mobility and LG Electronics.

Samsung is expanding its use of NVIDIA software across materials research, process development and device engineering. According to NVIDIA, Samsung's sMOL platform ran selected quantum chemical calculations up to five times faster end to end using cuEST. In a chip-scale thermal and mechanical workflow built with PhysicsNeMo, one test combined AI-predicted material properties, coarser grids and GPU acceleration for a roughly 1,600-fold speedup, cutting about 18 hours on a 32-core CPU to 41 seconds. That comparison pits a fine-grid CPU solve against a coarse-grid GPU solve, so the gain does not come from hardware alone.

Kakao Mobility plans to pursue a level 4 autonomous driving system by pairing its own software and operating experience in Seoul's Gangnam district with NVIDIA Hyperion, powered by DRIVE AGX Thor, and the Halos safety system. Initial development is planned around Kia purpose-built vehicles, with the goal of supporting future level 4 services in Korea.

LG Electronics and NVIDIA report demonstrating GR00T-powered manipulation and manufacturing tasks on LG's CLOiD robot in an actual factory setting. Their pipeline links real-world data collection, Cosmos-based augmentation, model training, onboard Jetson AGX Thor computing and simulation testing. The claims come from NVIDIA itself, and the Samsung and Kakao efforts are described partly as plans or explorations rather than finished deployments.