NVIDIA expands physical AI ecosystem in Korea with Samsung, Kakao Mobility and LG

Physical AI in manufacturing and engineering

NVIDIA said it is broadening its work with Korean industry leaders to bring the country's manufacturing and engineering strengths into physical AI. The scope runs from semiconductor manufacturing to robotics and autonomous vehicles.

Samsung: speedups in chip engineering

Samsung Electronics is using NVIDIA's accelerated computing and AI physics tools across materials research, process development and device engineering. The company is working with cuISS and cuDSS for sparse linear systems, cuEST for quantum chemistry calculations and is exploring cuEquivariance for atomistic AI models.

In one AI homogenization case, combining AI-predicted material properties, coarser grids and GPU acceleration produced roughly a 1,600x speedup. A simulation that took about 18 hours on a 32-core CPU with a fine grid dropped to 41 seconds with a GPU-accelerated coarse grid. Samsung also ran selected quantum chemistry calculations on its sMOL platform up to 5x faster end to end with cuEST.

Kakao Mobility: level 4 autonomy

Kakao Mobility plans to use NVIDIA's vehicle computing and safety technologies to develop a level 4 autonomous driving system. It will combine its operating experience in Seoul's Gangnam district with NVIDIA's Hyperion reference platform, powered by DRIVE AGX Thor, and Halos safety tools. Initial development is planned around Kia purpose-built vehicles.

LG: robot learning and factory simulation

NVIDIA and LG Electronics demonstrated Isaac GR00T-powered robotic manipulation tasks with LG's CLOiD robot in a real manufacturing environment. The work established a data flywheel linking real-world data collection, Cosmos-based data augmentation, GR00T training, Jetson AGX Thor onboard computing and simulation-based evaluation.