Hyundai takes full control of Boston Dynamics as SoftBank exits for $325 million

Hyundai Motor Group is buying SoftBank's remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, a deal that turns the Waltham, Massachusetts robotics company into a wholly owned part of the Korean automaker. The group is expected to approve the purchase on June 22, closing out SoftBank's last position in the company.

The price follows the put option SoftBank retained when Hyundai took control in 2021. In that transaction Hyundai paid about $880 million for an 80% stake, valuing Boston Dynamics at roughly $1.1 billion. SoftBank had bought the company from Alphabet in 2017, four years after Google acquired the robotics lab in 2013.

Atlas moves from the stage to the factory floor

At CES in Las Vegas on January 5, 2026, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics showed the electric Atlas humanoid robot in public: the life-sized machine stood up, walked around the stage and was remotely piloted for the demonstration. The more useful detail was the deployment plan. A production version of Atlas is expected to begin work at Hyundai's electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia, by 2028.

Hyundai plans to start Atlas with parts sequencing at its Metaplant in Georgia, then move toward heavier and more complex operations by 2030. Hyundai Mobis, the group's components arm, has been tied to actuator production for Atlas, keeping one of the robot's most important hardware systems inside Hyundai's own industrial base.

The bar is high. Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter said in January that Atlas would need to learn new factory tasks in a day or two and reach 99.9% reliability before it could be genuinely useful on the floor. Spot, the company's four-legged robot, remains its first clear commercial success; Atlas is the harder test, because humanoid robots must justify themselves where traditional automation already works.

A crowded humanoid race

Competition is no longer theoretical. Tesla has shifted part of its Fremont factory story toward Optimus after ending Model S and Model X production, Figure AI has pushed humanoid robots into BMW factory trials, and Unitree has made lower-cost humanoids impossible to ignore. None of them matches Boston Dynamics' record in locomotion, but they do not have to: they need robots cheap enough, useful enough and reliable enough to win specific jobs.

SoftBank's bigger AI bet

For Masayoshi Son, the exit looks small next to SoftBank's AI infrastructure campaign. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that SoftBank is forming Roze AI, a venture meant to use artificial intelligence and robotics to build physical infrastructure, including data centers, with reporting citing a target of a $100 billion valuation and a possible listing as soon as this year. The $325 million from Boston Dynamics is minor next to SoftBank's $41 billion OpenAI bet.

Hyundai is making the narrower wager: one robot, one factory network, one deadline. By 2028, Atlas is supposed to be doing real work in Georgia rather than walking across a stage in Las Vegas.