The South Korea-based global automotive leader, Hyundai Motor Co., has seen its market capitalization surge by approximately $24 billion since the start of 2026—a figure equivalent to the entire market cap of U.S. electric vehicle startup Rivian. The company's stock price has skyrocketed by 30% year-to-date on the Korean exchange, joining the nation's two memory chip titans, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, as core drivers behind the Kospi index's robust continuation of its explosive 76% surge in 2025 into a powerful 2026 opening rally. Hyundai Motor's current market valuation is far from that of a conventional automaker; it now embodies three of the hottest investment themes in global equity markets: "NVIDIA AI GPU-powered AI factories," autonomous driving technology, and AI-powered humanoid robots. This convergence is precisely why investor bullish sentiment towards this automaker has been intensifying recently. During Tuesday's trading session in Seoul, Hyundai Motor's stock surged more than 10%, once again hitting a fresh all-time high. Analysts have been aggressively raising their price targets following the company's deepening collaboration with the "AI chip superpower," its demonstration of ambitious autonomous driving systems at last week's CES global tech exhibition, and the high-profile unveiling of its Atlas humanoid robot.
On the Korean exchange, shares of Hyundai Motor affiliates, including logistics unit Hyundai Glovis, parts supplier Hyundai Mobis, and IT firm Hyundai Autoever—companies also linked to the Hyundai Motor Atlas humanoid robot supply chain—have similarly reached record highs. The South Korean stock market, the wildest performer globally in 2025, has seen its benchmark KOSPI index climb steadily since the start of 2026, repeatedly setting new historical peaks. This performance includes breaching key psychological levels such as 4300, 4500, and 4600 points, and recording an intraday high near 4693 points during today's (January 13th) session, marking yet another record closing high. Since the beginning of 2026, the benchmark Kospi index has powerfully extended the momentum from its frenzied 76% gain in 2025, racking up an impressive 8% cumulative increase in the early days of the new year. The unparalleled "revival-style rally" of the Korean market in 2025 is one for the history books of global finance, with the benchmark index logging its strongest annual gain in 25 years. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix contributed nearly half of that advance, while South Korean defense and nuclear energy firms were also major contributors.
More significantly, Wall Street analysts believe the Korean market still has substantial room for further gains. Top-tier brokerage firms, including Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Nomura, project the Korean benchmark index could rise by at least another 20% next year. Analysts added that additional government stimulus measures, coupled with a strong earnings growth trend led by the "memory chip super-cycle," should continue to support this "bullish trajectory" for Korean equities. Overall, the exceptionally strong start to the year for Asian markets, including South Korea, highlights their growing appeal to global equity investors. As these investors grow wary of U.S. tech giants like NVIDIA, Google, and Tesla trading near historic valuation peaks and the prospect of a weaker U.S. dollar, the latest global capital flows suggest Asian tech stocks still have further upside potential. "Valuations for core technology companies on the AI computing power supply chain in Asian equity markets remain very cheap compared to their global peers," said Nick Ferres, Chief Investment Officer at Vantage Point Asset Management Pte. in Singapore, in an interview. "We are only less than halfway through the global AI capital expenditure super-cycle and its associated productivity boom," Ferres stated.
A series of heavyweight collaborations with NVIDIA, particularly the increasingly deep partnership on the Atlas robot project, has ignited substantial investor interest in Hyundai Motor's potential to become a global leader in physical AI. This has also helped related robotics supply chain companies, which lagged behind the AI-driven memory chip and corporate reform frenzy that propelled the Korean market in 2025, catch up in the 2026 stock market rally. According to insights from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, "physical AI" emphasizes enabling robots/autonomous systems to perceive, reason, and execute a complete set of actions in the real world. In Huang's view, an era of human civilization evolution assisted by "physical AI" is imminent. "Physical AI" focuses on allowing robots/autonomous systems to sense, reason, and act in the real world—these three capabilities are the key toolchain for advancing models from "just conversing" to "getting things done in the physical world." "Investors' perception has changed," said senior analyst Huh Jae-hwan from Eugene Investment & Securities. "Hyundai Motor's AI, robotics, and autonomous driving projects help the company shed its outdated image as a legacy automaker, and its stock is still undervalued, leaving clear room for further gains."
During CES 2026, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Euisun Chung met with Jensen Huang to explore possibilities for expanding their collaboration in autonomous driving, particularly against the backdrop of NVIDIA's major release of its open-source autonomous driving AI platform, such as the Alpamayo family of open-source autonomous driving large models. They discussed potential directions for future cooperation on full self-driving capabilities similar to Tesla's FSD. "This year you will see an increasing focus in the automotive manufacturing industry on physical AI and autonomous driving," said C.J. Finn, head of the U.S. automotive practice at PwC, adding that there will be close attention on how companies leverage AI to tackle the challenges of safely deploying fully driverless cars. "I do think that connectivity around autonomous driving technology will become the most central focus." Jensen Huang referred to Alpamayo as the "ChatGPT moment for physical AI." The flagship autonomous driving model, Alpamayo 1, is a vision-language-action (VLA) model with 10 billion parameters. Unlike traditional systems that merely detect objects and plan paths, Alpamayo employs a breakthrough "chain-of-thought AI reasoning" approach. It processes video input to generate driving trajectories, but more crucially, it also outputs the logic behind its decisions. "This is not just a driving model; it's a model that can explain its own thought process," Huang stated. During a demonstration, Huang played a video showing Alpamayo not only driving a car but also explaining its decision-making logic in natural language, such as, "The brake lights of the vehicle ahead are illuminated; it might be slowing down, so I should maintain distance."
Beyond the Alpamayo family of open-source reasoning VLA models, NVIDIA also recently launched the AlpaSim simulation tool and Physical AI Open Datasets. Officially, these are combined with Alpamayo to form a complete development loop of "model + simulation + data," aimed at enhancing the safety and verifiability of full self-driving technology. Prior to the CES meeting between Chung and Huang, major South Korean conglomerates, including Samsung and Hyundai Motor, collectively announced in late October their intention to partner with NVIDIA in a massive investment to build "AI factories" supporting the country's enormous AI training/inference workloads, planning to procure large-scale clusters of NVIDIA AI GPUs. During NVIDIA CEO's official visit to South Korea on October 31st, NVIDIA announced collaborations with Samsung Electronics, SK Group, and Hyundai Motor Group to advance the construction of AI super factories. Under the multiple agreements, NVIDIA will supply hundreds of thousands of high-performance AI GPUs to help launch South Korea's massive AI infrastructure project. It was understood that NVIDIA stated it would collaborate with Hyundai Motor Group on next-generation Blackwell architecture-based AI super factories to drive innovation in autonomous vehicles, smart factories, and robotics. The partners plan to deploy 50,000 NVIDIA Blackwell architecture AI GPUs to jointly develop AI capabilities for autonomous driving and mobility solutions, build next-generation smart factories, and advance breakthroughs in high-performance device-side semiconductor technology. Integrating AI model training, validation, and deployment via GPU clusters is a core objective for both parties.
Notably, even after such a significant short-term surge in market capitalization, Hyundai Motor's stock remains highly attractive from a valuation perspective. The stock trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of just 8.3x, below the KOSPI benchmark's multiple of 10x. Hyundai Motor's sharp stock appreciation coincides with investors actively seeking beneficiaries in the physical AI application space, a trend also fueled by new listings. HD Hyundai Robotics, part of the separate HD Hyundai Group, has hired investment banks for its planned initial public offering (IPO) on the Korean exchange. Hyundai Motor's subsidiary, Boston Dynamics, is currently valued at approximately 100 trillion won (around $68 billion), according to the latest estimate from Daol Investment & Securities. Hyundai Motor Group has stated that there are currently no specific IPO plans for Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Company acquired Boston Dynamics in 2020.
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