Hyundai Motor Group is acquiring SoftBank's remaining 9.65% stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million, "closing out SoftBank's last piece of Boston Dynamics and turning the Waltham, Massachusetts robotics company into a wholly owned Hyundai business," reports Startup Fortune. From the report: The price is $325 million for the remaining stake, according to the deal terms, and it follows the put option SoftBank retained when Hyundai bought control of Boston Dynamics in 2021. You should read that as a signal, not a footnote. Hyundai paid about $880 million for an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics in the 2021 transaction, valuing the company at roughly $1.1 billion at the time. SoftBank had bought Boston Dynamics from Alphabet in 2017, after Google had acquired the robotics lab in 2013. It was a strange ownership path for a company whose robots became famous on YouTube long before they became obvious commercial products.
That part is changing. At CES in Las Vegas on January 5, 2026, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics showed the electric Atlas humanoid robot in public, with the Associated Press reporting that the life-sized robot stood up, walked around the stage and was remotely piloted for the demonstration. The useful detail was not the stagecraft. It was the deployment plan. A production version of Atlas is expected to begin work at Hyundai's electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia, by 2028. [...] If Hyundai can turn that into repeatable manufacturing value, the SoftBank exit will look less like a tidy cleanup and more like the moment Hyundai stopped borrowing a robotics future and decided to own it outright.
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