South Korea Opens First Public AI Humanoid Robot Data Factory to Build Domestic Physical AI Infrastructure

On November 3, South Korea officially opened its first public AI humanoid robot data factory, a national infrastructure initiative led by the Ministry of Science and ICT in collaboration with KIMM and ETRI. The facility deploys 12 humanoid robots to collect high-quality physical interaction data for home scenarios such as opening fridges and operating vehicle buttons, aiming to reduce reliance on external training data. Concurrently, Samsung SDS began construction of a 60MW AI data center, while LG's robot data factory entered partial operation with plans to produce 500,000 hours of training data in collaboration with NVIDIA. The project represents a 'government + chaebol' strategy to build a domestic data reserve for embodied AI, distinguishing Korea's approach from US self-reliance and China's supply-chain iteration models.