Hyundai is preparing to buy out the last piece of Boston Dynamics it does not already own. The South Korean carmaker plans to acquire SoftBank's remaining 9.65% stake in the US robotics firm for $325m, a deal that would make the maker of the Atlas humanoid a wholly owned Hyundai subsidiary, according to a newspaper report.
The move would close a chapter that began in 2021, when Hyundai took a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank.
The Japanese group kept a minority holding, and the report says it has now told Hyundai it wants to exercise a put option, the right, agreed at the time of the original sale, to sell that remaining stake back. Hyundai is expected to convene a board meeting on 22 June to approve the purchase.
The arithmetic of ownership is already lopsided. Hyundai Motor Group, including affiliates Hyundai Motor, Kia, Hyundai Mobis, and Hyundai Glovis, together with executive chair Euisun Chung, holds just over 90% of Boston Dynamics.
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The $325m would mop up the rest, removing SoftBank from the cap table entirely and giving Hyundai undivided control of one of the best-known names in robotics.
The timing is not incidental. Boston Dynamics is at a pivotal moment, having moved its electric Atlas humanoid from demonstration to commercial production, with the entire near-term output earmarked for Hyundai.
The two have laid out plans for a factory capable of building 30,000 humanoids a year, and Atlas is slated to begin work sequencing parts at Hyundai's Metaplant facility in Georgia. Full ownership lets Hyundai integrate that roadmap without a second shareholder in the room.
That roadmap places Hyundai in a fast-crowding field. Humanoid robots have become one of the most contested frontiers in technology, with Tesla pushing its Optimus toward mass production and a wave of rivals, many of them Chinese, racing to commercialise their own machines.
Owning Boston Dynamics outright gives Hyundai a vertically integrated play: a carmaker that designs the robots, builds them, and deploys them on its own assembly lines.
For SoftBank, the sale is consistent with its habit of recycling capital out of maturing bets and into newer ones. The group has been redeploying aggressively across AI and robotics, and exercising the put option turns a legacy stake into cash at a clean valuation.
It also underscores how Boston Dynamics' centre of gravity has shifted decisively from Japanese financial ownership to Korean industrial control.
The deal is not yet sealed; it awaits the board's approval, and the figure and structure come from a newspaper report rather than an official announcement.
Neither Hyundai nor SoftBank has confirmed the terms publicly. The use of a pre-agreed put option, however, suggests a transaction following a path both sides anticipated years ago rather than a sudden negotiation.
The bet is as much industrial as technological. Hyundai is not buying Boston Dynamics to sell robots to the public; it is buying a captive supplier of automation for its own car plants, with Atlas slated to handle repetitive assembly tasks that are hard to staff and harder to retain workers for.
Owning the robotics firm outright means Hyundai captures both the cost savings on its lines and any external sales that follow, rather than sharing the upside with a financial investor.
It also hardens a vertical integration that few rivals can match. Carmakers have generally bought robots from third parties; Hyundai would design, build, and deploy its own, closing a loop from research lab to factory floor.
In a humanoid market still long on demonstrations and short on profitable deployments, a caution underscored by China's crowded robot boom, controlling the full stack is a way of turning a celebrated robotics brand into an operational advantage rather than a showcase.
If approved, Hyundai gains complete ownership of a robotics pioneer at exactly the moment the technology is moving from spectacle to deployment.
The $325m is small against Hyundai's ambitions, but the control it buys is the point: in a race where the machines are finally reaching factory floors, Hyundai wants to own the one it is betting on outright.