The stock price of modern cars, which combines three major investment themes of AI, autonomous driving, and Siasun Robot & Automation, has surged wildly, increasing its market value by 24 billion US dollars.

Hyundai Motor Co., the global automotive leader headquartered in South Korea, has seen its market value increase by about $24 billion since the beginning of 2026 - equivalent to the current total market value of the US electric vehicle newcomer Rivian. The company's stock price in the South Korean market has surged by as much as 30% this year, making it a key contributor to the strong start of the Korean Kospi Composite Index in 2026 after a wild 76% surge in 2025. Hyundai Motor's current market value label is no longer just a simple automaker. The company combines three of the hottest global stock market investment themes - "NVIDIA Corporation AI GPU", autonomous driving technology, and AI humanoid Siasun Robot & Automation - which is why investors' bullish sentiment towards this automaker has been steadily increasing in recent times. During the trading hours in the South Korean stock market on Tuesday, Hyundai Motor's stock price surged by over 10%, once again hitting a new historical record. Analysts attribute this to the company's increasingly close collaboration with the "AI chip superpower" NVIDIA Corporation, as well as its ambitious display of autonomous driving systems at last week's CES global technology exhibition, and the unveiling of the Atlas humanoid Siasun Robot & Automation, which led many analysts to significantly raise their price targets. In the South Korean stock market, in recent days, Hyundai's affiliated companies including logistics department Hyundai Glovis, parts supplier Hyundai Mobis, and IT company Hyundai Autoever, as well as Siasun Robot & Automation supply chain companies related to Hyundai's Atlas humanoid Siasun Robot & Automation, have all reached historical highs. South Korean stock market - the wildest stock market in the world in 2025 Since the beginning of 2026, the South Korean composite stock price index (KOSPI) has been continuously rising, repeatedly reaching new historical highs. Specific achievements include the index surpassing key levels such as 4300, 4500, 4600 points, and hitting a historical closing high of around 4693 points during today's trading hours on January 13, once again setting a new historical high. Since the beginning of 2026, the benchmark stock index of the South Korean stock market - the Kospi Composite Index - has continued its strong momentum following the 76% surge in 2025, with a cumulative increase of up to 8% since the beginning of 2026. The unparalleled "renaissance-like surge" of the South Korean stock market in 2025 is considered an event in global financial market history, with the benchmark index of the country recording its strongest surge in 25 years. Companies like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix contributed nearly half of this surge, while defense and nuclear energy companies in South Korea also played a significant role. Furthermore, Wall Street analysts predict a strong upward trend for the South Korean stock market, with leading Wall Street brokerages such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Nomura forecasting at least a 20% increase in the benchmark stock index next year. Analysts added that the Korean government's continued stimulus measures, coupled with strong profit growth trends driven by the "super cycle of memory chips," are expected to continue supporting the bullish trajectory of the South Korean stock market. Overall, the strong start of Asian stock markets, including South Korea, highlights the increasing attractiveness of Asian stock markets to global investors. With valuations of leading US tech giants such as NVIDIA Corporation, Alphabet Inc. Class C, and Tesla, Inc. reaching historical highs and concerns about the weakening US dollar, the latest trend of global funds is shifting towards additional upside potential in Asian tech stocks. Nick Ferres, Chief Investment Officer at Vantage Point Asset Management Pte. in Singapore, mentioned in an interview that core technology companies in the AI computing industry in Asia are still very cheap compared to their global counterparts. "We have only completed less than half of the global AI capital spending super cycle and its related productivity growth cycle," Ferres said. Deeply integrated with NVIDIA Corporation, Hyundai is a gathering of AI, autonomous driving, and humanoid Siasun Robot & Automation tags A series of significant collaborations with NVIDIA Corporation, especially the deepening cooperation on the Atlas Siasun Robot & Automation project, has sparked strong investment interest in Hyundai's potential to be a global leader in the field of physical AI. This has also helped related Siasun Robot & Automation supply chain companies catch up in the stock market surge in South Korea at the beginning of 2026 after lagging behind due to the AI boom driven by the storage chip and corporate reform trends in 2025. According to Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA Corporation, "physical AI" emphasizes enabling the Siasun Robot & Automation / autonomous system to sense, reason, and complete a full range of actions in the real world. Huang believes that we are entering an era where "physical AI" will complement human civilization. The ability of the Siasun Robot & Automation / autonomous system to perceive, reason, and act in the real world is essential in advancing from models that simply dialogue to models that can perform tasks in the physical world. Investors' views have changed," said senior analyst Xu Zaihuan from Eugene Investment & Securities. "Hyundai Motor's artificial intelligence, Siasun Robot & Automation, and autonomous driving projects have helped the company move away from its outdated image as a traditional automaker. And with its current stock valuation still relatively low, there is still significant room for further growth." During CES 2026, Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chairman Chung Euisun met with Jensen Huang to discuss expanding their cooperation in the field of autonomous driving, especially in the context of NVIDIA Corporation's launch of the open-source autonomous AI platform (such as the Alpamayo family open-source autonomous driving large model). They discussed potential directions for future cooperation in fully autonomous driving models similar to Tesla, Inc.'s FSD. "This year, you will see more and more focus in the automotive industry on physical AI and autonomous driving," said C.J. Finn, head of PwC America's Car-Mart, Inc., adding that there will be a particular focus on how companies use AI to address the challenges of safely introducing fully driverless vehicles. "I do think that the connectivity around autonomous driving technology will be one of the most critical focal points." Huang referred to Alpamayo as the "ChatGPT moment of physical AI." The flagship autonomous driving large model product Alpamayo 1 is a vision-language-action (VLA) model with 10 billion parameters. Unlike traditional autonomous driving systems that only detect objects and plan paths, Alpamayo uses a breakthrough method called "chained AI reasoning," focusing on processing video input to generate driving trajectories with logical explanations behind decisions. Huang said, "This is not just a driving model, but a model that can explain its thought process." During the exhibition, Huang played a demo video where Alpamayo not only drove a car but also used natural language to explain its decision logic, such as "the front vehicle's brake lights are on, it may be slowing down, so I should keep my distance." In addition to the Alpamayo family (open-source reasoning VLA model), NVIDIA Corporation has also introduced the AlpaSim simulation tool + Physical AI Open Datasets dataset, officially integrating them with Alpamayo into a complete development cycle of "model + simulation + data" to enhance the safety and verifiability of fully autonomous driving technology. Prior to the meeting between Chung Euisun and Jensen Huang at CES, Samsung and other South Korean conglomerates, including Hyundai, collectively announced at the end of October that they would join forces with NVIDIA Corporation to invest heavily in building an "AI factory" that would support massive AI training / inference workloads in South Korea. They planned to procure a large number of NVIDIA Corporation AI GPU clusters. During NVIDIA Corporation CEO's official visit to South Korea on October 31, various agreements were reached with Samsung Electronics, SK Group, and Hyundai Motor Group to advance the construction process of the AI super factory. As part of these agreements, NVIDIA Corporation would supply tens of thousands of high-performance AI GPUs to assist South Korea in launching a massive AI infrastructure project. NVIDIA Corporation stated that it would collaborate with Hyundai Motor Group to develop AI capabilities for autonomous driving and mobile travel solutions, build next-generation smart factories, and promote breakthroughs in high-performance on-premises semiconductor technology. The core goal of both parties is to achieve integrated AI model training, validation, and deployment through GPU clusters. It is worth noting that despite experiencing such a massive increase in market value in the short term, from a valuation perspective, Hyundai's stock remains highly attractive for investment, with the company's stock trading at only 8.3x earnings per share (expected P/E ratio) based on future profit forecasts, which is lower than the 10x P/E ratio of the South Korean benchmark stock index KOSPI. The significant increase in Hyundai's stock price comes at a time when investors are actively looking for beneficiaries in the field of physical artificial intelligence applications, while new companies going public are also fueling this trend. Hyundai Robotics, a subsidiary of Hyundai Group, part of the HD Modern Group, has hired investment banks to participate in its initial public offering (IPO) on the South Korean stock market. Boston Dynamics, a subsidiary of Hyundai under Hyundai Robotics, is currently valued at approximately 100 trillion South Korean won (about $68 billion), according to the latest estimates from Daol Investment & Securities. Hyundai Motor Group has stated that there are currently no specific IPO plans for Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Group acquired Boston Dynamics in 2020.