Hyundai Motor Group is moving to acquire SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% holding in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, a transaction that would make the robotics company wholly owned by the South Korean group. The purchase was expected to receive Hyundai approval on June 22, according to Startup Fortune, and follows a put option retained by SoftBank when Hyundai took control in 2021.
Hyundai paid about $880 million for an 80% stake in that earlier transaction, which valued Boston Dynamics at approximately $1.1 billion. SoftBank had acquired the Massachusetts-based company from Alphabet in 2017, four years after Google bought the robotics laboratory. The latest deal would close that chain of shared ownership and place product, manufacturing and deployment decisions under one industrial parent.
The timing coincides with Boston Dynamics’ effort to turn its electric Atlas humanoid into factory equipment. Hyundai and Boston Dynamics demonstrated Atlas publicly at CES in Las Vegas on January 5, 2026. A production version is expected to start work by 2028 at Hyundai’s electric-vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia. The initial plan described in the report centres on parts sequencing, with heavier and more complex operations contemplated by 2030.
That deployment gives Boston Dynamics an in-house first customer and a controlled environment in which to measure reliability. Chief executive Robert Playter has said Atlas would need to learn new factory tasks within a day or two and achieve 99.9% reliability to become genuinely useful, the report notes. Those are development goals, not demonstrated performance. Boston Dynamics’ four-legged Spot robot already has commercial uses, but a humanoid operating alongside established industrial automation presents a different economic and safety test.
Hyundai’s manufacturing network may support that transition beyond the factory floor. Group supplier Hyundai Mobis has been linked to actuator production for Atlas, bringing a critical hardware component closer to Hyundai’s automotive supply base. Full ownership could align robot design with parts availability, maintenance and production planning, although the transaction itself does not guarantee that Atlas will meet its deployment schedule.
Competition is also growing. Tesla is developing Optimus, Figure AI has placed humanoid systems in BMW factory trials, and Unitree is pursuing lower-cost machines. Boston Dynamics brings a long record in robotic locomotion, while rivals are seeking practical jobs and lower prices.
For SoftBank, the sale ends its direct Boston Dynamics position while it redirects capital toward artificial-intelligence infrastructure and other robotics investments. For Hyundai, the measure of the acquisition will be more concrete: whether Atlas can perform repeatable, valuable work inside the group’s own plants. The proposed 2028 Georgia deployment gives the combined company a visible deadline for that claim.
