- H2 Plus platform targets universities and research institutions
- Partnership comes as demand for humanoid robotics accelerates globally
Nvidia Corp. unveiled a new humanoid robot reference platform developed with Unitree (宇树科技) at Computex 2026, marking the first time the US AI chipmaker has selected a Chinese robotics company as the hardware partner for one of its reference designs.
Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang introduced the H2 Plus system, also known as the Isaac GR00T reference humanoid robot, during his keynote speech on June 1.
‘Dimensions similar to my own’
The platform is designed for universities and research institutions and will be available through Unitree by the end of 2026.
The system combines Unitree’s H2 humanoid robot with Nvidia’s AI computing hardware, foundation models and simulation software. It also incorporates five-finger robotic hands developed by Singapore-based firm Sharpa.
Huang said the platform had already been fully integrated. The robot stands about 1.8 meters tall, weighs 68 kilograms and features 31 degrees of freedom, while each hand has 25 degrees of freedom.
“The H2 platform stands approximately 1.8 meters tall and weighs 68 kilograms — dimensions similar to my own,” Huang joked during the presentation.
Built specifically for researchers
Computing power is provided by Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Thor T5000 platform, which is built on the Blackwell GPU architecture and includes 128GB of memory.
Nvidia said the system can deliver up to 2,070 trillion FP4 operations per second.
Huang said the platform was built specifically for academic researchers, with early users including Stanford University and ETH Zurich.
“We built this for higher education and university researchers, because for them to build this is insanely hard to do,” he said.
Reference designs serve as blueprints that allow developers, startups and research institutions to build customized systems on top of a validated hardware and software stack.
Nvidia has increasingly used such platforms to establish itself as a key supplier to the emerging robotics industry.
“The Nvidia Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence,” Huang said.
Unitree founder and chief executive Wang Xingxing said the collaboration would help accelerate robot development.
“H2 Plus combines Unitree’s humanoid with Nvidia Jetson Thor and the Nvidia Isaac GR00T development platform, giving teams a validated starting point for creating robot skills and bringing them into real-world applications,” Wang said.
The data bottleneck
Nvidia also introduced the broader Isaac GR00T development platform, which covers data generation, simulation, model training, evaluation and deployment.
Researchers retain control of their robot, training and telemetry data throughout the process.
Huang said data remains one of the biggest challenges facing physical AI, because “for agentic systems, robotic systems and physical AI, data is the hardest problem.”
“Most video data on the internet is filmed from a third-person perspective, but robots need first-person data captured at human or robot eye level to work in real environments,” he said.
He added that “securing data is becoming a bigger bottleneck than model performance.”
Despite the massive data bottlenecks in scaling humanoid robotics, Huang appeared confident that this innovation would become a major driver of economic activity.
“Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries, opening a multi-trillion-dollar economic opportunity,” the tech boss said.
For Unitree, the good news just keeps on coming
The tie-up between Nvidia and Unitree came on the same day Unitree cleared a critical Shanghai STAR Market listing review, just 73 days after its IPO application was accepted.
If it completes the final registration process, the Hangzhou-based company is expected to become the first publicly listed humanoid robot maker on China’s A-share market.
Investor interest in the sector has grown rapidly. According to a May report by Morgan Stanley analysts, annual humanoid robot sales in China are expected to more than double in 2026 to around 28,000 units, the highest level globally.
