At CES 2026 in Las Vegas on Jan. 5 (local time), LG Electronics’ home robot CLOiD guides visitors. Seoul Economic Daily DB
“We thought it would be a huge hit when CLOi (LG Electronics’ AI home robot) demonstrated folding towels in real time at CES 2026 early this year. But the reaction from visitors and the media fell short of expectations, with comments that the movements were slow. Honestly, I wondered whether deciding to do the demonstration had been a mistake.”
A senior LG Electronics (066570.KS) official recalled the January stage in these words during a recent meeting. But a closer look reveals a twist. The robots from other companies on stage at the time were either pre-recorded videos or remotely controlled from backstage. By contrast, CLOi’s real-time performance, judging and acting entirely on its own, effectively proved unmatched technological prowess. Having swallowed its disappointment, LG Electronics has made a bold move to achieve true Physical AI and overturn the market landscape.
According to industry sources Wednesday, LG Electronics is building a Data Factory, a robot-only learning space spanning 33,000 square meters (about 10,000 pyeong) of total floor area, at its Yangjae R&D Campus in Seocho-gu, Seoul. It is Korea’s first robot training center designed to advance the intelligence of humanoids (human-shaped robots).
Full operation will begin as early as this July with the deployment of its own humanoid robot CLOi. The company plans to expand the deployment to hundreds of units within the year and to invest hundreds of billions of won intensively through 2030. It is considered an ultra-core project within the group, with LG Electronics CEO Ryu Jae-cheol visiting the site every week to personally oversee progress.
The facility serves as a base that produces and verifies the “physical data” robots need to move and work on their own. While generative AI such as ChatGPT learns from vast amounts of text and images on the internet, humanoids that must move on their own rely on securing actual behavioral data—picking up, moving, and assembling objects in the real world.
To this end, LG Electronics has built environments inside the factory identical to a real home equipped with various appliances and a factory with operating production lines. It even brought in transport carts used at its Tennessee plant in the United States, aiming to collect hands-on data specialized for home and factory environments.
The high-quality data secured this way is used to advance the “Robot Foundation Model (RFM),” the robot’s AI brain. The plan is to rapidly overcome the limitations of existing humanoids, such as slow movements, through large-scale training, and dramatically accelerate market entry.
LG Electronics was recently selected as the lead company for the government-commissioned 34 billion won “Physical AI Leading Technology Development Project,” a recognition of its independent commercialization platform capabilities. Together with 10 industry-academia-research institutions including KT and KAIST, LG Electronics aims to build an independent World Model ecosystem and, by linking it with its ThinQ smart home platform, complete its vision of a Zero Labor Home with no household chores.
The global humanoid market is projected to grow rapidly to $37.8 billion (about 52 trillion won) by 2035. Global big tech firms such as Nvidia and Google have also rushed into the Physical AI competition. LG Electronics has likewise declared this year as the inaugural year of full-scale robot business.
The in-house development of core components is also progressing smoothly. The company is combining its motor and control hardware capabilities accumulated in home appliances—including mass production of the LG actuator Axium, which serves as robot joints—with the advanced software brain (RFM) capabilities developed through the Yangjae training center. The strategy is to firmly establish itself as a comprehensive robot company spanning the entire robot ecosystem, from components to AI brains.
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