A research robot built in collaboration with Unitree and Sharpa represents the first of several planned agreements by Nvidia, to be followed by partnerships with allies in the United States, Europe, and South Korea.
The first model in Nvidia’s new research line combines three origins: the body comes from China’s Unitree, the hands from Singapore-based Sharpa, and the computing system from Nvidia.
Following Jensen Huang’s keynote speech in Taipei on Monday, ahead of the Computex trade fair, the company announced its intention to repeat this formula with humanoid robot manufacturers in the United States, Europe, and South Korea.
The machine unveiled this week is a standardized version of Unitree’s H2 robot, designed as a reference platform for academic researchers. The idea is to provide laboratories with common hardware to work on, avoiding each facility having to purchase different machines individually.
Among those planning to use it are researchers from Stanford University, the University of California San Diego, Seattle-based Ai2, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego’s Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory. Sales, aimed primarily at research institutions, are expected to begin by the end of this year.
The robot uses Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T platform — a reference software and hardware stack the company has been developing for humanoid robotics — acting more as the connective tissue of these partnerships than as a single chassis.
Nvidia executives told Reuters that the company intends to seek more partnerships like the one with Unitree, but with robotics firms outside China. They did not name specific potential partners in the United States, South Korea, or Europe, and spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not yet public. That part of the announcement should be taken lightly: the stated intention to work with unnamed companies across three regions is more of a roadmap than a finalized deal.
The timing is hard to overlook. Unitree’s robot arrived the same week that the Chinese company itself began trading on the stock market, competing with higher-revenue rivals — including Tesla in the humanoid space last year. Unitree has become the most visible name in a Chinese sector that shipped approximately 90% of the world’s humanoid robots in 2025, making it both an obvious and an awkward partner for Nvidia. The company shipped more humanoid units last year than any competitor, including Tesla, and is preparing a Shanghai listing alongside its domestic peer AgiBot.
That awkwardness is the subtext of the broader plan. Nvidia’s argument is that it supplies the brain regardless of which body it resides in, and aligning U.S., European, and South Korean partners alongside Unitree extends that bet across the geopolitical map rather than concentrating it in China.
For a company whose chips have already become entangled in export control politics, a robotics strategy that does not depend on any single country holds obvious appeal.
For now, what is concrete is a research robot with a Chinese body, Singaporean hands, and an Nvidia brain, headed to a named list of universities by the end of this year. The rest is a plan, relayed to a news agency by people who declined to be named.