Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego are among those planning to use it, along with Seattle-based Ai2, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego’s Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory. Sales, primarily to research institutions, will begin later this year.
The robot uses Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T platform, the benchmark software and hardware stack the company has been developing for humanoid development, which is the connective tissue between these partnerships rather than a single chassis.
Nvidia executives told Reuters that the company intends to pursue more partnerships like Unitree’s with robotics companies outside China. They did not name potential American, South Korean and European partners, and spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not public. That’s the part of the announcement worth taking lightly. The stated intention to work with unnamed companies in three regions is a direction of travel, not an agreement.
It’s hard to miss the moment. The Unitree robot landed the same week that the Chinese company itself moved towards a public listing, after having outsold its rivals, including Tesla in humanoid units last year. Unitree has become the most visible name in a Chinese sector that will ship roughly 90 percent of the world’s humanoid robots by 2025, making it an obvious and uneasy partner for Nvidia. The company shipped more humanoid units last year than any rival, including Tesla, and is preparing a Shanghai listing alongside compatriot AgiBot.
That discomfort is the subtext of the larger plan. Nvidia’s argument is that it supplies the brain regardless of what body it is in, and by aligning American, European and Korean partners with Unitree it extends that bet across the geopolitical map rather than concentrating it in China.
For a company whose chips are already entangled in export control policiesA robotics strategy that does not depend on a single country has obvious appeal.
For now, the concrete thing is a research robot with a Chinese body, Singapore hands and an Nvidia brain, which will head to a list of named universities later this year. The rest is a plan, told to a news service by people who did not want to put their names to it.
