South Korea opens a "data factory" where humanoid robots practice chores
A state research institute will have 12 remote-controlled robots record kitchen, laundry and car tasks to train robot AI.
South Korea opened its first facility built to mass-produce training data for humanoid robots Tuesday, Korea time, the state-funded Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials said, according to the Seoul news outlet Aju Press.
Robots, like chatbots, learn from examples. But there is no internet full of robot movements to copy, so researchers have to make the data. At the new AI Humanoid Data Factory, people steer 12 two-legged humanoid robots by remote control through everyday jobs: pulling food from a refrigerator, handling laundry, tidying a sofa and working the buttons and levers inside a car.
Each recorded motion trains vision-language-action models, AI systems that turn what a robot sees and is told into movement. The trained AI then goes back into the robots for testing, and those results feed the next round of training.
The site covers about 1,000 square meters, or about 10,800 square feet, and was built with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, another government lab. It plans to grow to 25 robots and open to companies and universities in stages from late 2027.
Securing high-quality robot task data on a large scale is the core of national technological competitiveness
Why it matters
The institute said the factory should reduce South Korea's reliance on foreign data and AI models. On the same day, TechNode reported that GenRobot AI, a Beijing startup that records human movements to train robots, had raised $100 million. South Korea's budget ministry set aside 2.3 trillion won, about $1.7 billion, through 2030 for its humanoid industry.
Source: Aju Press, Nov. 3, 2026, citing the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials; TechNode.