Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn is working with American chipmaker NVIDIA to develop humanoid robots in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
According to a report in Focus Taiwan, Foxconn Chairman Young Liu, speaking at the Kaohsiung Smart City Annual Meeting, said that the company will integrate Nvidia’s advanced software and hardware technology to develop these humanoid robots. revealed ambitious plans.
The partnership marks a major leap forward in Foxconn’s efforts to diversify its portfolio beyond contract manufacturing in the electronics sector. Mr. Liu also highlighted plans to collaborate with Taipei and Keelung on smart city projects and strengthen app development and sovereign AI capabilities.
The move to humanoid robots is consistent with the company’s financial outlook. Liu predicts that consolidated revenue will exceed NT$7 trillion (US$213 billion) in 2025, driven by growing demand for AI servers and robotics applications.
AI servers are expected to account for 40% of the company’s server revenue in 2024 and rise to 50% by 2025, highlighting its role as a key growth driver.
NVIDIA’s role
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang defended the role of robotics in the AI revolution, saying humanoid robots are the next frontier of innovation alongside self-driving cars.
The humanoid market is expected to reach $38 billion over the next 20 years, and creating high-quality datasets for humanoids for imitation learning can be extremely tedious and time-consuming.
Huang unveiled the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint on the CES stage, featuring 14 humanoid robots in the background. This blueprint is a simulation workflow for synthetic motion generation that allows developers to create large datasets for training humanoids using imitation learning.
Jensen called this “ChatGPT’s moment in robotics in general.”
Source:X
As announced on the official blog, users can now use Apple Vision Pro to capture digital twins of human behavior. The robot mimics the movements in the simulation and records them for use.
Central to this vision is Nvidia’s next Jetson Thor computing system, scheduled to debut in early 2025. “Building a foundational model for a typical humanoid robot is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today,” Jensen said.
Built on Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell architecture, Jetson Thor is a compact AI superchip that boasts 208 billion transistors, a high-performance CPU cluster, and an integrated safety processor.
Encounter with real-world applications
Foxconn and Nvidia’s partnership represents a broader trend toward embodied AI, which integrates perception, cognition, and behavior into physical entities.
Advanced datasets, such as AgiBot World’s human interaction trajectories and large-scale AI models such as Robot Era’s ERA-42, are accelerating the development of versatile intelligent robots.
David Friedberg of The All-In Podcast also predicted that 2025 will be the year of AI robots. “I think this is going to be the year that we all look at humanoid robots and autonomous systems and think, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is here,'” he said.
The road ahead
Foxconn has a rich history of deploying robots such as its own Foxbot to automate production lines, and is poised to expand its robotics expertise into humanoid systems.
The company now plans to expand into areas such as healthcare by introducing humanoid robots with more advanced interactions and capabilities.
The company has previously proposed partnering with NVIDIA to leverage its EV ambitions, using NVIDIA’s flagship product Blackwell to build Taiwan’s fastest AI supercomputer.
In India, the company has partnered with HCL Group for semiconductor business and announced Project Cheetah, another Foxconn facility for manufacturing and assembly of EV components, as announced by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. This adds to the list of Foxconn projects in Karnataka after Project Elephant.
With Foxconn and Nvidia teaming up, advances in humanoid robotics are poised to transform industries and bring new possibilities to manufacturing, healthcare, and more.
Equipped with advanced hardware, extensive datasets, and innovative AI models, this partnership will help robots not only mimic human behavior, but also be seamlessly integrated into everyday life, redefining the boundaries between AI and robotics. It suggests a defining future.
