Nvidia launches humanoid robot platform with Unitree amid US-China tech competition tensions

The Humanoid Robot of the Future Is a 6-Foot-Tall Beefcake With a Chinese Body and an American Brain

The humanoid robot of the future is a hulking specimen with a body that's made in China and a brain that runs on American silicon. This week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, announced a blueprint for the bot, which combines a few different things: a 6-foot, 150-pound robot called H2 Plus from Unitree, a high-flying Chinese robotics startup; a Thor T5000 Nvidia chip; an advanced humanoid hand; and a new suite of software, which makes it easy to program and train the machine. Taken together, they'll make it easier for researchers, including US academic labs, to put together cutting-edge humanoids and train them with their own AI algorithms. The Thor chip can run powerful AI models that allow the bot to make sense of its environment and control its movements, while the body features Unitree's motors, actuators, and sensors. The dextrous, humanlike hand from Singaporean company Sharpa can do everything from card tricks to peeling an apple. (Dexterity remains a key unsolved problem in robotics.) Spencer Huang, Nvidia's director of product for robotics, told WIRED that the company wants to provide its silicon smarts for as many humanoid companies as possible. "Unitree is the first, but they're not going to be the last by a long shot," Huang said. (Yes, he's Jensen's son.) He added that the technology in H2 could potentially make other Chinese robots, including conventional industrial arms, more capable. In some ways, the partnership is unexpected: Robotics has emerged as a critical new arena for US-China techno-competition, and some politicians have proposed banning Chinese humanoids altogether. Last year, security researchers claimed that Unitree's robots were capable of capturing and transmitting data, raising security risks. But in other ways, the team-up makes perfect sense. "This is a fascinating development," says Scott Singer, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies AI governance and China. Singer notes that while the US has the world's best AI chips, China's supply chain gives its robotics companies a hardware edge. "Both sides have key parts of the supply chain that they might be able to weaponize, but here they are working together," he says. Nvidia, for its part, appears to be aware of the security concerns. Besides nimble fingers and a new brain, the new H2 Plus blueprint comes with security features that seem designed to reassure users that their data and models are safe. Nvidia's chips are currently the gold standard for training large AI models, and the company has made big efforts to move into advanced robotics by developing specialized hardware and software tools. The US government bars Nvidia from selling its most capable chips to China but late last year loosened restrictions to allow it to sell more advanced chips there. Singer says that robots and AI are widely seen as key to manufacturing and economic productivity, future military capabilities, and advances in AI itself. He believes it will be crucial for the US to figure out how to foster its own robotics industry, which might well mean finding ways of working with Chinese manufacturers. Unitree's robots are already hugely popular inside China and abroad; they're relatively easy to program and remarkably cheap. A base version of the G1 humanoid costs around $15,000, compared with competitors' robots that can run several hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop. Unitree's bots can often be seen doing parkour, kung-fu, and other acrobatic feats in social media videos, and they're featured in research published by many Western labs. Not everyone is enthused to see Chinese robot makers grow rapidly. Gavin Kenneally, cofounder and CEO of Ghost Robotics, which makes legged robots for defense and security, says he believes Unitree's technology has drawn extensively on innovations from Western labs. He adds that it will be crucial that the US does not allow China to dominate the market for humanoids or any other robots. "Without a serious near-term policy response, including a national robotics strategy, the US risks ceding the commercial robotics market to Unitree and other Chinese companies, as we've already seen happen in the drone space with DJI," he says. But Nvidia's CEO sees plenty of upside to working with Chinese robot makers. "Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world's largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity," Huang said. This is an edition of Will Knight's AI Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

Nvidia to work with US, European humanoid robot makers in addition to China's Unitree

SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 (Reuters) - Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab plans to work with humanoid robot makers in the U.S., Europe and South Korea in addition to China's Unitree to build robots for researchers, according to the AI chip company's executives. After CEO Jensen Huang's keynote address in Taiwan on Monday ahead of the Computex trade show, Nvidia announced that the company is working with China's Unitree, a leading maker of humanoid robots, to provide a standardized version of Unitree's H2 robot that can be used by academic researchers. The robot's body will come from Unitree, its hands will come from Singapore-headquartered Sharpa, ⁠and the computing brains of the device will come from Nvidia. Nvidia said that researchers at Stanford University and the University of California San Diego, among others, plan to use the machines. Unitree, whose dancing robots were the centerpiece of China's Spring Festival gala earlier this year, is pursuing a public listing in China. But U.S. 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 U.S. government funding. Nvidia executives told Reuters that the company plans to ⁠pursue more efforts like the Unitree one with robotics firms outside China. They did not name the partners in the U.S., South Korea and Europe and spoke on condition of anonymity as the plans are not public. The Nvidia executives said the work with Unitree is aimed at improving the cybersecurity of ⁠the Unitree robots for researchers. For example, 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. By directly integrating Nvidia's 'Blackwell' chips ⁠with Unitree's robot bodies, Nvidia, which plans to use the machines in its own research, will bring the same security features that it uses to protect data center servers, the ⁠executives said. Those security technologies, known as secure boot and confidential computing, are aimed at ensuring the robots cannot run malicious code and that sensitive data cannot be moved off the robots without permission. Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

NVIDIA's Isaac Gr00t platform gives researchers access to frontier humanoid robotics - Engadget

It uses a nearly 6-foot tall humanoid chassis and tactile five finger hands. As part of his AI-palooza Computex keynote, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang dove into the most relatable form of artificial intelligence: robots. The company announced the new Isaac Gr00t reference design humanoid robot platform that combines a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot, Sharpa five-fingered hands and NVIDIA Jetson Thor onboard compute. That's tied together with NVIDIA's Gr00t open software and models designed to help "researchers and developers accelerate humanoid development workflows." The platform uses a nearly 6-foot tall Unitree H2 humanoid chassis that weighs 150 pounds, with 31 degrees of freedom across the body. (The H2 model is listed on Unitree's website for $29,900, though the company has only shown renders on its website). The Gr00t developer platform will also support the cheaper Unitree G1 humaoid robot. NVIDIA first revealed its Gr00t N1 foundational model in March. The chassis is married to dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands with 22 degrees of freedom, multi-view sensing including a head-mounted stereo camera, wrist cameras and inertia measurement, along with whole-body control with arm torque of up to 120 Newton-meters (88 foot pounds). Gr00t Isaac is powered by NVIDIA's Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard compute with an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, 128GB of unified memory and a configurable 40 to 130 watt power range . The 15Ah battery provides just under 1 kWh of capacity for about three hours of endurance. As has been a theme with humanoid presentations, there was no physical robot to be seen. Rather, Huang touted Isaac Gr00t as an open foundation humanoid development platform. The company said that multiple institutions including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego will use the reference design. "Robotics moves fastest when researchers can build on open platforms, share code and test ideas on real machines," said Stanford Robotics Center's executive director Steve Cousins in a statement.

Nvidia picks Unitree for humanoid robot platform as Chinese startup eyes IPO

Nvidia has selected Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree for the first robotics system the U.S. chipmaker is selling to researchers from Stanford to ETH Zurich, the company announced Monday. The system combines Unitree's nearly 6-foot-tall H2 humanoid robot with Nvidia's Jetson Thor hardware, which includes the company's advanced Blackwell GPU for on-device artificial intelligence capabilities. Nvidia's humanoid-focused AI models, known as Isaac GR00T, and simulation systems are part of the new robot testing package, according to a press release. The robot also uses mechanical hands made by Singapore-based Sharpa. PitchBook lists Qiming Venture Partners among the startup's backers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that "physical AI" could become a market worth tens of trillions of dollars. He told investors last month he expects rapid growth in the robotics segment over the next five years. "Today, we're announcing the Nvidia Isaac Root, a reference humanoid robot, all fully integrated, 25 degrees of freedom on that on each hand made by Sharpa, 31 degrees of freedom on the robot, six feet 150 pounds, just like me," Huang said Monday in a keynote speech in Taipei. "This platform runs the new Thor, and our entire software stack, data generation stack, data simulation stack, the runtime, all integrated into a robot that is designed for everyone to use," he said. "We built this for higher education and university researchers, because for them to build this is insanely hard to do." The new system also expands Nvidia presence in robotics software development, building on the chipmaker's edge in AI computing through its widely used CUDA software platform.

NVIDIA launches Unitree-based humanoid robot system for research

NVIDIA has introduced what it calls the first open humanoid robot reference design built on its Isaac GR00T development platform, giving researchers access to an integrated hardware and software ecosystem for developing next-generation humanoid robots. The new platform combines a human-scale robot body, advanced onboard AI computing, dexterous robotic hands, and an open software stack designed to streamline robot training, simulation, and deployment. Announced at NVIDIA GTC Taipei, the reference design aims to address one of the biggest challenges in humanoid robotics. The fragmented development process often requires teams to piece together hardware, software, simulation environments, and AI models from multiple vendors. The Unitree H2 humanoid robot is at the crux of the system, a nearly six-foot-tall machine weighing around 150 pounds. The robot features 31 degrees of freedom across its body, enabling human-like movement and testing in real-world environments. NVIDIA has paired the robot with dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, adding another 44 degrees of freedom and bringing the total to 75 across the platform. The system includes multiple sensing technologies, including a head-mounted stereo camera, wrist-mounted cameras for manipulation tasks, and an inertial measurement unit for motion tracking. The robot can also handle demanding physical tasks thanks to arm torque of up to 120 Newton-meters and leg torque of up to 360 Newton-meters, while supporting payloads of up to 15 kilograms (33 pounds). Powering the robot's onboard intelligence is NVIDIA's Jetson AGX Thor T5000 computing platform. The system features a Blackwell-based GPU capable of delivering 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, along with a 14-core Arm CPU and 128GB of unified memory for real-time sensor processing and robot control. The humanoid platform is tightly integrated with NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T software ecosystem, which spans data collection, simulation, training, evaluation, and deployment. Researchers can use Isaac Teleop to capture demonstration data, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for virtual training and testing, and Isaac ROS middleware to deploy trained policies onto physical robots. The platform also includes NVIDIA's open foundation models for humanoid reasoning and learning, allowing robots to perform multitask behaviors and develop increasingly sophisticated capabilities. Researchers can adopt the complete software stack or integrate individual components into existing robotics workflows. NVIDIA said the same development platform will also support the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, expanding accessibility to institutions already using the popular research platform. Several leading robotics institutions have already committed to using the reference design, including Ai2, ETH Zurich, the Stanford Robotics Center, and the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego. "Robotics moves fastest when researchers can build on open platforms, share code and test ideas on real machines," said Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center. By combining advanced hardware, onboard AI computing, and an open development ecosystem, NVIDIA is positioning the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot as a common foundation for the next generation of humanoid robotics research.

'Robots that can perform real work': Nvidia, Unitree, and Sharpa are forming a super-group to make the most capable humanoid robots yet -- with Jensen Huang promising a 'meaningful step' towards frighteningly capable robots

* Nvidia, Unitree, and Sharpa have a new robotics deal * The companies will produce a cutting-edge humanoid robot blueprint * These robots are going to be better equipped for 'real work' There are some very impressive humanoid robot demos out there, but questions remain about just how capable these bots are at tackling real work, without supervision -- questions that Nvidia, Unitree, and Sharpa are looking to answer with a new partnership. The collaboration was announced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Computex 2026 (via the South China Morning Post), and will lead to a 'reference design' called H2+ or Isaac GR00T: essentially, a blueprint that manufacturers can follow that covers every aspect of development, from data collection to real-world deployment. Nvidia will be supplying the AI data that means robots will be able to reason and act in useful ways (the brains of the operation). "For agentic systems, robotic systems and physical AI, data is the hardest problem," Huang said in his keynote speech. "You've seen us moving up this ladder." The brain itself will be the Nvidia Jetson AGX Thor T5000 chip, based on a Blackwell GPU. It provides 128GB of memory and up to 2,070 FP4 teraflops of artificial intelligence compute -- a cool two quadrillion AI calculations per second, to navigate the world with. 'A meaningful step' Unitree brings its H2 humanoid robot to the partnership, while Sharpa provides the five-fingered robot hands. Those hands are more important than you might think, if robots are to be expected to handle objects and operate tools with any level of precision. The new deal between the three companies is "a meaningful step towards deploying robots that can perform real work, in real settings" according to Sharpa founder David Li Yifan. Work is now underway to get the Sharpa Wave hands integrated into the Unitree H2 -- hands dexterous enough to deal a pack of cards. Once the H2+ / Isaac GR00T reference design is published, it should enable companies to get robots into the field more quickly, and customize them more exactly for a specific range of jobs beyond the basics. Robots based on this blueprint will be able to better adapt to changes in the future too. Nvidia had several other announcements to make at Computex 2026, including a world foundation model called Cosmos 3. This will give AI a greater understanding of the physical world from both first-person and third-person perspectives. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

NVIDIA Announces NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot for Academic Research

* NVIDIA announces an open humanoid robot reference design built on the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T platform, combining a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot, Sharpa five-fingered hands for dexterous manipulation, NVIDIA Jetson Thor onboard compute for advanced reasoning and control, and NVIDIA Isaac GR00T open software and models. * The Isaac GR00T development platform -- spanning data capture and generation to robot model evaluation and deployment -- helps researchers and developers accelerate humanoid development workflows. * Leading research institutions including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego's Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory will use the reference design to advance frontier humanoid robotics research. TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NVIDIA GTC Taipei -- NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA Isaac™ GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, the first open humanoid robot reference design built on NVIDIA Jetson Thor™ and the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T open development platform. The reference design helps democratize frontier humanoid robotics research by providing access to advanced hardware and an open software stack without requiring proprietary platforms. As demand for general-purpose humanoids accelerates, researchers still face a fragmented process spanning hardware integration, data collection, simulation, training, evaluation and deployment. The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot unifies development by bringing a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot and Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands (the "body"), with NVIDIA Jetson Thor-powered onboard compute and Isaac GR00T software and workflows (the "brain") into a single integrated reference design, helping research teams move faster from robot bring-up to skill development and real-world validation. With NVIDIA's compute and open software stack at the center, the reference design gives research teams a more unified, secure foundation for advancing humanoid robotics. "Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world's largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence." A State-of-the-Art Humanoid Robot for Physical AI Development The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot is a state-of-the-art platform that brings the key building blocks for frontier humanoid research into one system, pairing a human-scale robot body with dexterous manipulation, sensing, control and onboard AI compute. The reference design features: * Unitree H2 humanoid chassis, standing nearly 6 feet tall and weighing 150 pounds, with 31 degrees of freedom across the body for human-scale testing. * Dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, enabling dexterous manipulation with 22 degrees of freedom and bringing the robot to 75 degrees of freedom across the body and hands. * Multi-view sensing, including a head-mounted stereo camera with wide field of view (140 degrees horizontal, 102 degrees vertical), wrist cameras for close-range manipulation and an inertia measurement unit for motion tracking. * Whole-body control, with arm torque of up to 120 Newton-meters, leg torque of up to 360 Newton-meters, a rated arm payload of 7 kilograms and peak payload of 15 kilograms, unlocking more capable lifting and reach. * NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor™ T5000 onboard compute, featuring an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU with 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, a 14-core Arm CPU, 128GB of unified memory and a configurable 40- to 130-watt power range for real-time sensor processing and robot inference. * Connectivity across Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, USB and an array of microphones and speakers for voice interaction. * Battery for extended operation, with a 15Ah, 0.972kWh capacity and about three hours of life. * On-remote emergency stop function for quickly disengaging the robot safely. NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Provides a Full-Stack Platform for Humanoid Development The NVIDIA software stack provides the development environment for simulation, training, evaluation and deployment, while researchers retain control of their robot data, training data, telemetry and logs. The Isaac GR00T platform includes: * NVIDIA Isaac Teleop to capture high-quality robot demonstration data for training and policy development. * NVIDIA Isaac GR00T open foundation models to support humanoid reasoning, learning and multitask behavior. * NVIDIA Isaac Sim™ and Isaac Lab to simulate, train, test and evaluate robot policies before real-world deployment. * Accelerated NVIDIA Isaac ROS middleware to move trained policies onto robots. * NVIDIA Jetson Thor to run real-time, on-robot inference and control. Its modular design lets robotics teams use the full platform or integrate selected capabilities into existing development pipelines, helping them scale humanoid development without rebuilding the same infrastructure for each robot or task. The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T developer platform will also support the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, extending the same development approach to a robot widely used by researchers and humanoid developers across leading institutions. Accelerating the Robotics Research Ecosystem Leading research institutions including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego's Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory will use this humanoid robot reference design to advance frontier humanoid robotics research. "Robotics moves fastest when researchers can build on open platforms, share code and test ideas on real machines," said Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center. "The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Robot gives our students and collaborators an open humanoid reference design with dexterous hands, onboard AI compute and the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T development platform for creating, comparing and sharing robot behaviors on physical hardware." "ETH Zurich's robotics research aims to advance machines that can move, perceive and manipulate reliably in the real world," said Marco Hutter, professor at ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab. "The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T reference design gives our teams a state-of-the-art humanoid platform for collecting data, testing algorithms and validating robot behaviors with the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T development platform." "To make progress toward general-purpose robots, researchers need platforms that are both capable and broadly accessible," said Deepak Pathak, cofounder and CEO of Skild AI. "A reference design lets more researchers participate in frontier humanoid research and move from ideas to experiments faster. This helps push the whole robotics research ecosystem forward." "At Ai2, our mission is to accelerate robotics through open science," said Dieter Fox, senior research director at Ai2 and professor at the University of Washington. "The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Robot, built on NVIDIA's open technologies, provides our researchers with the hardware and software components necessary to continue our work in broadly competent robotics." "Advancing robotics research for real-world problems requires humanoids that can move, interact and manipulate with precision in dynamic environments," said Michael Yip, professor at UC San Diego and director of the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory. "An integrated platform that connects robot hardware, data capture, policy learning and physical evaluation can help researchers accelerate loco-manipulation research and develop more useful real-world systems." NVIDIA Research will also use this reference design to advance Isaac GR00T open models, frameworks and hardware. Availability The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot will be available from Unitree in late 2026. The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T reference workflow for Unitree G1 is expected to be available soon on GitHub and Hugging Face for robot developers. Watch Huang's keynote and learn more at NVIDIA GTC Taipei. About NVIDIA NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing. For further information, contact: Quentin Nolibois Corporate Communications NVIDIA Corporation [email protected] Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: humanoid robots bringing physical AI to the world's largest industries, opening a multi trillion-dollar economic opportunity; expectations with respect to growth, performance, availability, and benefits of NVIDIA's products, services and technologies, and related trends and drivers; expectations with respect to NVIDIA's third party arrangements, including with its collaborators and partners; expectations with respect to technology developments, and related trends and drivers; projected market growth and trends; expectations with respect to AI and related industries; and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are subject to the "safe harbor" created by those sections based on management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic and political conditions; NVIDIA's reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test NVIDIA's products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to NVIDIA's existing products and technologies; market acceptance of NVIDIA's products or NVIDIA's partners' products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of NVIDIA's products or technologies when integrated into systems; NVIDIA's ability to realize the potential benefits of business investments or acquisitions; and changes in applicable laws and regulations, as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company's website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances. Many of the products and features described herein remain in various stages and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. The statements above are not intended to be, and should not be interpreted as a commitment, promise, or legal obligation, and the development, release, and timing of any features or functionalities described for our products is subject to change and remains at the sole discretion of NVIDIA. NVIDIA will have no liability for failure to deliver or delay in the delivery of any of the products, features or functions set forth herein. © 2026 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, NVIDIA Isaac, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor and NVIDIA Jetson Thor are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/24497e30-9cfb-40f4-b5b9-f570f8c0fd3a

Nvidia to work with US, European humanoid robot makers in addition to China's Unitree

After CEO Jensen Huang's keynote address in Taiwan on Monday ahead of the Computex trade show, Nvidia announced that the company is working with China's Unitree, a ⁠leading maker ⁠of humanoid robots, to provide a standardized version of Unitree's H2 robot that can be used by academic researchers. Nvidia plans to work with humanoid robot makers in the U.S., Europe and South Korea in addition to China's Unitree to build robots for researchers, according to the AI chip company's executives. After CEO Jensen Huang's keynote address in Taiwan on Monday ahead of the Computex trade show, Nvidia announced that the company is working with China's Unitree, a ⁠leading maker ⁠of humanoid robots, to provide a standardized version of Unitree's H2 robot that can be used by academic researchers. The robot's body will come from Unitree, its hands will come from Singapore-headquartered Sharpa, and the computing brains of the device will come from Nvidia. Nvidia said that researchers at Stanford University and the University of California San Diego, among others, plan to use the machines. Unitree, whose dancing robots were ⁠the centerpiece of China's Spring Festival gala earlier this year, is pursuing a public listing in China. But U.S. 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 U.S. government funding. Nvidia executives told Reuters that the company plans to pursue more efforts like the Unitree one with robotics firms outside China. They did not name the partners in the U.S., South Korea and Europe and spoke on condition of anonymity as the plans are not public. The Nvidia executives said the work with Unitree is aimed at improving the cybersecurity of the Unitree robots for researchers. For example, 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. By directly integrating Nvidia's 'Blackwell' chips with Unitree's robot bodies, Nvidia, which plans to use the machines in its own research, will bring the same security features that it uses to protect data center servers, the executives said. Those security technologies, known as secure boot and confidential computing, are aimed at ensuring the robots cannot run malicious code and that sensitive data cannot be moved off the robots without permission.