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The South Korean auto-and-tech giant plans to buy SoftBank Group's remaining 9.65% stake in the U.S. robotics firm for approximately $325 million, according to reporting by South Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper. Hyundai is expected to convene a board meeting on June 22 to formally approve the purchase.
The deal would make Boston Dynamics a wholly owned Hyundai subsidiary, folding in the final outside slice of the robot maker the Korean conglomerate has spent years quietly consolidating. Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung, along with affiliates Hyundai Motor, Kia, Hyundai Mobis and Hyundai Glovis, already controlled just over 90% of the company heading into this transaction.
The trigger for the sale traces back to a contractual arrangement struck when Hyundai first acquired Boston Dynamics in 2021. At that time, SoftBank retained a minority stake and secured a put option allowing it to offload those remaining shares if Boston Dynamics had not pursued a U.S. IPO by June 2026. That deadline has now arrived, and so has the bill.
Hyundai, for its part, held a mirror-image call option permitting it to buy SoftBank out regardless of whether the Japanese tech investor chose to exercise its put. Either way, the endgame was always the same.
The timing makes obvious strategic sense. Industry observers peg Boston Dynamics' current market value at more than 30 trillion won, a staggering 24-fold surge from the roughly 1.25 trillion won valuation, placed on it when Hyundai first came aboard. Physical AI is now one of the hottest sectors on the planet, and Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot Atlas sits squarely at its center.
Revenue at the robotics company climbed about 30% last year to 150.1 billion won. Net losses, however, swelled roughly 20% to 528.4 billion won as investment costs mounted, a reminder that the Atlas commercialization story remains very much a work in progress.
An IPO is widely expected to follow, with the listing set to finally put a hard public number on one of robotics' most iconic names.
