G-Dragon’s agency just opened a theme park where the headline act does not sweat, does not cancel, and does not need a hotel rider. Welcome to Galaxy Robot Park in eastern Seoul: 5,000 pyeong of humanoids doing K-pop, taekwondo, portraits, ice cream, piano, and the occasional hug. The grand opening landed August 21 after a pre-open stretch that pulled in about 20,000 people. The house specialty is Robot Arena — a 40-minute showcase of machines dancing, kicking, and sharing the stage with actual humans.
Yes, it looks a little like a science fair that got a styling budget. Early shows had the occasional mid-song shuffle-off. Four months later the formations are tighter, the spacing is cleaner, and CEO Choi Yong-ho is calling the choreography system “autonomous driving” for robots: AI watches dance videos, maps the moves, and keeps the units from colliding. Not a room of operators with joysticks. That is the point.
The set list is not shy. Reporters got ROSÉ’s “APT.,” Yena’s “Catch Catch,” BIGBANG’s “Bang Bang Bang,” Momoland’s “Banana Chacha,” plus G-Dragon and Taemin material the park has been training on since spring. Humans and robots even ran taekwondo together. The machines did jumping side kicks. The crowd clapped. History will decide if that was cute or a dress rehearsal.
“Once Big Bang and Taemin finish their world tours, the robot world tour will begin.”
— Choi Yong-ho
A Million Won, Then a Unicorn
Galaxy was not born a talent agency with a robot hobby. Choi restarted the company in 2019 with a million won after an earlier business had gone under. The pitch was already hybrid: entertainment intellectual property married to AI, later to bodies. He calls the firm a physical-AI “ent-tech” shop, not a traditional management office that wandered into hardware. G-Dragon signed at the end of 2023. That is when the spreadsheet woke up.
By late 2025 Galaxy was a unicorn — a trillion-won valuation — and the books had flipped. A year that carried an 18.8 billion won operating loss turned into the black. First-half 2025 was already profitable. By the fourth quarter they were talking roughly 299 billion won in revenue, up more than sixfold, and 12.5 billion won in operating profit. The driver they name out loud is G-Dragon’s Übermensch world tour: 39 shows, 17 cities, 12 countries, more than 825,000 tickets. Choi has also said, without much poetry, that G-Dragon still accounts for 75 to 80 percent of revenue. The park is what they are buying with that money. The concentration is the risk they put on the slide deck themselves.
Around that one catalog they stacked a warehouse of famous humans: SHINee’s Taemin, actor Song Kang-ho, Kim Jong-kook, Jung Il-woo, Ryu Jun-yeol, and San Francisco Giants outfielder Lee Jung-hoo. Not a neat “idol company.” A holding pattern for anyone whose face can travel.
The Show They Already Made
They are not Studio Dragon. There is no weekly sageuk factory humming in the basement. The content hit already on the books is Netflix’s Physical: 100 — the survival series that went global — which Galaxy has been publicly tied to as producer. In the company’s own listing talk it is filed as a No. 1 Netflix franchise. That is the production story: one smash unscripted show, a celebrity roster, and now a park that treats choreography as software. The robot idol is the attempt to stop being eighty percent one human.
Built for kids. Aimed at the Map
Galaxy is not pretending the Seoul venue is for the cynics in the press pit. Choi has said the park is built first for children. Adults clock every stiff wrist. Kids clock that a humanoid just danced next to them and then offered a hug. The rest of the complex leans into that: drawing robots, boxing robots, piano robots, 17 new types added for the official opening, plus a restaurant and bakery so the family can process what they just saw over bread. The technical imperfections that read as failure to an adult read as proximity to a child. That is not a dodge. That is the product.
Then the ambition leaves Seoul. Dubai is next — a second Robot Arena by year-end, aimed at tourists from a hundred countries. Manhattan gets a September 21 drop: a robot modeled on Choi’s own face, plus 17 others, timed to the International Day of Peace. After that comes the sentence that will split group chats: robot idols. Debut targeted for the first half of next year. World tour in the second half. Choi’s pitch is blunt. Human tours top out around 30 to 35 countries. Bodies get tired. Robots can play the same night in multiple cities, go where humans will not, and do the dangerous bits without a medic on standby. More than 100 countries is the number he keeps saying out loud.
Radio, the light bulb, a Park in Gangdong.
It sounds insane. So did radio. So did the light bulb. People stared at a talking box and a glowing filament and asked who would possibly want that in the house. Then the house changed.
This is still awkward in places. Unitree-built humanoids in K-pop fits are not replacing G-Dragon. They are not supposed to. Galaxy’s bet is that entertainment’s next export is not only a person on a plane — it is IP that can be performed, copied, and sent everywhere at once. Physical AI, they call it. Content with a body.
Laugh at the wigs. Fine. Just do not be shocked if, a few years from now, a sold-out night in a city that never got the human tour is being danced by something that learned the choreo off YouTube and never asked for a day off.
