Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Chung Eui-sun said Sept. 4 that steel from Hyundai-POSCO Louisiana Steel (HPLS) should eventually find its way into Atlas, the humanoid robot being developed by group-owned Boston Dynamics.
"I think we naturally should apply it," Chung said after the mill's groundbreaking ceremony in Donaldsonville, Louisiana.
He went further, saying he hoped steel produced there could one day reach rockets made by companies such as SpaceX.
The ambition is less of a leap than it sounds.
Industry shorthand increasingly describes a humanoid as an electric vehicle standing on two legs. Both depend on batteries, motors, reducers, inverters and controllers, except a humanoid multiplies those systems across dozens of moving joints.
Atlas stands 1.9 meters tall, weighs about 90 kilograms and has 56 degrees of freedom across its body.
Each moving joint requires its own compact drive system.
Reducer gears, splines and shafts need high-strength, durable specialty steel. Motors, meanwhile, depend on stacks of ultra-thin non-oriented electrical steel, from the same family of magnetic steel used in electric-vehicle motors.
The bigger money sits in the finished robot joint.
Actuators combine motors, gears, sensors and control systems to create the joints and muscles of a humanoid. Hyundai Motor Group says the components can account for about 60 percent of robot manufacturing costs.
Hyundai Mobis has agreed to supply actuators for Atlas and is expected to become a central part of Hyundai Motor Group's effort to localize the robot supply chain in the United States.
The group plans to establish U.S. actuator production capacity exceeding 350,000 units annually from 2028 alongside a robot manufacturing system capable of producing 30,000 units a year.
More than 25,000 Atlas robots are expected to be deployed across Hyundai Motor and Kia manufacturing facilities, giving the group captive demand as it scales production.
Louisiana is where that supply chain touches steelmaking.
HPLS is designed to produce 2.7 million tons of steel annually from 2029, including 1.8 million tons of automotive steel and 900,000 tons of general-purpose products.
Iron ore and natural gas will be used to produce direct-reduced iron, which will be melted with scrap in electric-arc furnaces before being cast into slabs and rolled into hot-rolled, cold-rolled and coated steel.
Hyundai Steel says the process can reduce carbon emissions by about 70 percent compared with conventional blast-furnace production.
The more specialized grades a humanoid requires sit elsewhere in the Korean steelmakers' portfolios for now.
Electrical steel and specialty bar steel are not on HPLS' announced product list, which currently covers hot-rolled, cold-rolled and coated sheets.
POSCO's 20 percent stake therefore adds another dimension to the partnership. Hyundai Steel owns 50 percent of HPLS, while Hyundai Motor and Kia each hold 15 percent.
Chung has described the tie-up with POSCO as an opportunity to cooperate on future steel materials and next-generation batteries, extending a relationship traditionally centered on automobiles.
Boston Dynamics is moving in much the same direction from the other end of the chain.
"Every component has been designed for compatibility with automotive supply chains," Atlas General Manager Zack Jackowski said when the production version was unveiled at CES 2026.
Boston Dynamics reduced the number of unique components in Atlas as it redesigned the humanoid for mass manufacturing, drawing on the scale and cost discipline of the auto industry.
Steelmakers are following those same customers into AI.
POSCO aims to increase steel sales to AI-related markets to 1 million tons by 2030 from about 380,000 tons last year, including electrical steel for power equipment and humanoid robots.
Hyundai Steel is separately targeting growing demand from AI data centers and power infrastructure, with the company expecting the data-center share of its long-product sales to rise to about 6 percent from roughly 3 percent.
Chung was cautious about how quickly that might happen.
"Atlas is intended to do work that is difficult for people," he said, adding that feasibility testing would have to come first.
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