Abstract The k-means algorithm is one of the most often used method for data clustering. However, the standard k-means can only be applied in the original feature space. The kernel k-means, which extends k-means into the kernel space, can be used to capture the non-linear structure and identify arbitrarily shaped clusters. Since both the standard k-means and kernel k-means apply the squared error to measure the distances between data points and cluster centers, a few outliers will cause large errors and dominate the objection function. Besides, the performance of kernel method is largely determined by the choice of kernel. Unfortunately, the most suitable kernel for a particular task is often unknown in advance. In this paper, we first present a robust kmeans using `2,1 -norm in the feature space and then extend it to the kernel space. To recap the powerfulness of kernel methods, we further propose a novel robust multiple kernel k-means (RMKKM) algorithm that simultaneously finds the best clustering label, the cluster membership and the optimal combination of multiple kernels. An alternating iterative schema is developed to find the optimal value. Extensive experiments well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.