{"id":242466,"date":"2026-08-10T05:03:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T10:03:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/samsungs-inhouse-robots-are-a-chip-play-not-a-product"},"modified":"2026-08-10T05:03:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T10:03:21","slug":"samsungs-inhouse-robots-are-a-chip-play-not-a-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/samsungs-inhouse-robots-are-a-chip-play-not-a-product","title":{"rendered":"Samsung\u2019s InHouse Robots Are A Chip Play, Not A Product"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/samsungs-inhouse-robots-are-a-chip-play-not-a-product.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Samsung didn\u2019t promote from within to lead RX\u2019s strategy \u2014 it hired Executive Vice President Lee Dongkun, who previously directed robotics strategy at Hyundai Motor Group, the parent of Boston Dynamics, and who oversaw development of the electric Atlas humanoid and Spot quadruped during Hyundai\u2019s push to commercialize both. That hire, paired with Samsung\u2019s Rainbow Robotics subsidiary already commercializing the RBY1 wheeled dual-arm platform and developing HUBO bipedal prototypes, signals a company assembling deployment expertise, not just research capability. See our coverage of <a href=\"https:\/\/creedtec.online\/unitrees-time-cover-hides-a-9-industrial-deployment-problem\/\">Unitree\u2019s TIME cover hiding a 9% industrial deployment problem<\/a> for how deployment expertise, not funding or hype, is the scarce resource across this entire sector right now.<\/p>\n<p>Samsung\u2019s in-house robots strategy also extends to components most competitors buy from third parties: the company is developing its own actuators using motor technologies adapted from home appliances, an unusual but financially logical move for a company that already runs enormous consumer-electronics manufacturing lines. Owning that layer reduces both cost and dependency on the same small set of actuator suppliers every other humanoid maker competes for.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u26a0 Fiction \u2014 composite scenario, not a real event:<\/strong> A robotics analyst covers Samsung\u2019s RX division purely as a Tesla and Unitree competitor, publishing a forecast comparing unit shipment targets. Two years later, Samsung has shipped fewer finished humanoids than expected \u2014 but its foundry chip revenue from robotics customers across five different manufacturers has quietly become a bigger business line than the humanoid unit itself, exactly the outcome the shipment-focused forecast never modeled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Samsung didn\u2019t promote from within to lead RX\u2019s strategy \u2014 it hired Executive Vice President Lee Dongkun, who previously directed robotics strategy at Hyundai Motor Group, the parent of Boston Dynamics, and who oversaw development of the electric Atlas humanoid and Spot quadruped during Hyundai\u2019s push to commercialize both. That hire, paired with Samsung\u2019s Rainbow [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}