Nvidia, Unitree and Sharpa unite to design humanoid robot that can perform ‘real work’

Nvidia has pulled together an unlikely trio to push humanoid robots off the drawing board and onto the factory floor. The US chip giant is partnering with Chinese robotics champion Unitree and Singaporean hand maker Sharpa to release a reference design called H2+, a complete blueprint for a humanoid robot that can perform what the companies call “real work”. The announcement, made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Computex in Taipei, marks the first time these three players have combined their distinct strengths into a single, off-the-shelf package. The H2+ design is deceptively simple in concept. It marries Unitree’s human-sized H2 robot body with Sharpa’s five-fingered Wave robotic hands, then slots in Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T foundational models as the robot’s reasoning engine. What makes this more than a parts list is the integration. The GR00T models provide the advanced decision-making that turns a mechanical frame into something capable of adapting to messy, real-world environments. For developers, this means they can skip the years of custom integration work and start training robots for specific tasks immediately. Sharpa founder David Li Yifan described the partnership as “a meaningful step towards deploying robots that can perform real work, in real settings”. That phrasing matters. The humanoid robotics industry has produced a parade of impressive prototypes that dance, run and open doors, but few have demonstrated sustained usefulness in a manufacturing context. The H2+ aims to change that by giving researchers a standardized platform that can be customized for factory labor, warehouse logistics or assembly line work. Unitree has been one of several Chinese humanoid makers to embrace Nvidia’s technology, but this collaboration goes deeper than a simple supplier relationship. By contributing its H2 body to a reference design, Unitree is effectively opening its hardware to the broader developer community. Reference designs function as blueprints that other industry participants can adopt and modify. Nvidia has been pushing this strategy across multiple sectors, from autonomous vehicles to medical imaging, as it seeks to make its chips and software indispensable in emerging hardware markets. Huang underscored the data challenge that has stalled humanoid adoption. “For agentic systems, robotic systems and physical AI, data is the hardest problem,” he said in his Computex keynote. The H2+ addresses this by streamlining the full development workflow — data collection, policy training and real-world deployment — into a single pipeline. That is a critical bottleneck. Most robotics startups spend the bulk of their resources gathering and labeling training data rather than refining algorithms or testing hardware. What a casual observer might miss is the geopolitical subtext. This partnership brings together a US chip giant, a Chinese robot maker and a Singaporean component supplier at a time when technology supply chains are fragmenting along national lines. Nvidia has faced export controls on its most advanced chips to China, yet here it is collaborating openly with a Chinese robotics champion. The H2+ design does not require the most cutting-edge Nvidia hardware, but it does lock Unitree and Sharpa into Nvidia’s software ecosystem, creating long-term dependency. For Singapore, the deal elevates Sharpa from a niche component maker to a player in global robotics standards. The city-state has been positioning itself as a neutral hub for advanced manufacturing, and this partnership gives its robotics sector a direct line into the platforms that will define the next generation of industrial automation. Sharpa’s Wave hands are not just appendages; they are the interface between machine intelligence and physical objects, and their inclusion in a Nvidia-backed reference design The H2+ is available now to developers and researchers. The real test will come not in the lab but on the factory floor, where humanoid robots must prove they can match the speed, reliability and cost-effectiveness of traditional automation. If they can, the H2+ may become the template that finally moves humanoids from spectacle to standard equipment.

Nvidia has partnered with Chinese robotics champion Unitree Robotics and Singapore robotic hand maker Sharpa to release a new humanoid robot reference design to accelerate innovation in the global humanoid industry, the US chip giant’s CEO, Jensen Huang, an...

Nvidia’s H2+ design gives Chinese and Singaporean robotics firms a standardized platform to scale humanoid production beyond prototypes into factory-ready labor.

The development adds to a wider Singapore manufacturing story in which companies are being judged on execution, capital access, regulatory fit and the credibility of their regional expansion plans.

For business readers, the important question is whether this becomes an isolated announcement or part of a more durable operating pattern across customers, financing channels, partners and public-market expectations.