SoftBank Trades Its Last Boston Dynamics Stake for a Research Lab

SoftBank Group agreed Sept. 18 to buy the Robotics and AI Institute back from Hyundai Motor Group, The Robot Report reported, five years after selling the institute's sister company, Boston Dynamics, to the same buyer. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal is now under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

RAI Institute, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told The Robot Report it had "nothing to share on this topic right now." The trade lands months after Hyundai moved to pay SoftBank $325 million for the last slice of Boston Dynamics that SoftBank still held, a transaction with its own paper trail of prior reporting. Put the two deals side by side and the pattern is a clean split: the robot maker goes entirely to Hyundai, and the lab that taught the robot to move goes entirely back to SoftBank.

A lab that cost $400 million to spin out

Hyundai created RAI Institute in 2022 as a spinout when it took its controlling stake in Boston Dynamics, seeding it with more than $400 million and installing Marc Raibert, who founded Boston Dynamics in 1992 and stepped down as its chief executive in January 2020, to run the new research arm. RAI's work spans robot control, perception, manipulation and navigation, and it produced the whole-body learning framework that Boston Dynamics has used to give the electric version of Atlas its acrobatic movement, according to The Robot Report. That is the asset SoftBank is now buying back: not a robot line, but the research group that made one particular robot line move the way it does.

The stake Hyundai bought at a fixed price

Hyundai's pursuit of SoftBank's Boston Dynamics stake dates to at least July 16, when Hyundai's own newsroom confirmed that SoftBank had exercised a put option, a contractual right forcing Hyundai to buy shares SoftBank wanted to sell. KED Global reported the price at $325 million for SoftBank's remaining 9.65% stake, following Hyundai's initial 80% purchase for roughly $921 million in December 2020, when Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun personally took a 20% stake alongside the corporate buyers.

The number that matters here is not the $325 million but what it is not: a current market price. Humanoids Daily reported that the $325 million figure reflects the fixed terms of that 2021 put option, while Boston Dynamics itself carries a valuation of roughly $19.6 billion, or 30 trillion won, tied to plans for a Nasdaq listing in 2027 or 2028. Nine point six five percent of $19.6 billion is about $1.9 billion. SoftBank locked itself out of more than $1.5 billion of upside when it wrote that option five years ago, and Hyundai is the counterparty collecting the difference.

1. 2021 put-option price0.33 $ billions
2. Implied value at $19.6B valuation1.9 $ billions

Source: KED Global, June 21, 2026, and Humanoids Daily, June 24, 2026, accessed 2026-09-18

Transaction	Buyer	Price
Boston Dynamics stake (9.65%)	Hyundai Motor Group	$325 million
Robotics and AI Institute	SoftBank Group	Undisclosed

Why Hyundai wants Atlas at $320,000 apiece

Hyundai's own statement lays out where the humanoid actually goes to work: Atlas is due to begin parts-sequencing tasks at the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in 2028, expanding to component assembly by 2030. Reporting tied to the stake purchase put Hyundai's target at roughly 25,000 Atlas units deployed across its factories starting in 2028, priced below $320,000 each, a program that, at that ceiling, runs to roughly $8 billion in hardware alone before Hyundai counts integration, maintenance or the software RAI built. That is a different bet than the one Hyundai is making on the passenger side of its business, where it competes on undercutting a rival's sticker price by a few hundred euros rather than committing billions to a robot line with no comparable product to price against. Hyundai's statement also points to Atlas demonstrations already completed: delivering the ceremonial match ball at a FIFA World Cup 2026 game, and lifting a 23-kilogram compact refrigerator, the kind of stunt that photographs well but says little about a factory floor's actual duty cycle.

What CFIUS could still block

None of this closes until the RAI transaction clears the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the same national-security review that scrutinizes foreign control of American technology assets. A Cambridge, Massachusetts robotics research institute changing hands to a Japanese buyer is a plausible CFIUS case on its own terms, even though the same buyer previously owned a larger stake in the same corporate family without triggering the same scrutiny reported here; neither The Robot Report nor the broader reporting on the deal says what specifically drew CFIUS's attention this time.

The unresolved question is whether RAI keeps building for Boston Dynamics once the two companies no longer share an owner. SoftBank is separately working through a $5.3 billion purchase of ABB's industrial robotics arm, and a research lab with a working whole-body learning framework is exactly the kind of asset that could feed ABB's arms instead of, or alongside, Hyundai's humanoid. That split mirrors a question the rest of the humanoid-robot field is still working through separately: whether the software that makes a robot move safely around people is a feature of one company's hardware or a layer that should sell independently of it. Whether Hyundai's Atlas program keeps direct access to RAI's research under some licensing arrangement, or has to keep advancing on whatever the institute already handed over before the ownership split, will matter more to Hyundai's 2028 deployment date than either price tag does.