Nvidia announced partnerships with US and European humanoid robot makers, extending beyond existing China-based Unitree relationship.

Nvidia announced that it is working with China's Unitree, a leading maker of humanoid robots, to provide a standardized version of Unitree's H2 robot for use by academic researchers. The announcement came after CEO Jensen Huang's keynote address in Taiwan on Monday ahead of the Computex trade show. According to Nvidia executives, the company plans to pursue similar efforts with humanoid robot makers in the US, Europe and South Korea in addition to its partnership with Unitree.

The standardized robot combines components from multiple suppliers: Unitree provides the robot's body, Singapore-headquartered Sharpa provides the hands, and Nvidia provides the computing brains of the device. Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California San Diego, among others, plan to use these machines.

Unitree, whose dancing robots were the centerpiece of China's Spring Festival gala earlier this year, is pursuing a public listing in China. However, US lawmakers have alleged that Unitree has extensive ties to the Chinese government and military and have introduced a bill that would ban use of the firm's robots by researchers who receive US government funding.

Nvidia executives told Reuters that the company plans to pursue more efforts like the Unitree one with robotics firms outside China, though they did not name the partners in the US, South Korea and Europe and spoke on condition of anonymity as the plans are not public. According to the executives, the work with Unitree is aimed at improving the cybersecurity of the Unitree robots for researchers. By directly integrating Nvidia's "Blackwell" chips with Unitree's robot bodies, Nvidia will bring the same security features that it uses to protect data center servers, including secure boot and confidential computing technologies. These security measures are designed to ensure the robots cannot run malicious code and that sensitive data cannot be moved off the robots without permission. Any software updates meant for the robot's subsystems will have to flow through Nvidia's chip, where the code can be checked for authenticity.