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Nvidia is on the verge of revolutionizing robotics through artificial intelligence, Chief Executive Jensen Huang said Monday, as he outlined his vision for the next phase of the company’s meteoric growth and predicted a “million dollar” opportunity.
Huang announced a number of new products and partnerships in the “Physical Artificial Intelligence” space, including AI models for humanoid robots and a major deal with Toyota to use Nvidia’s self-driving car technology, during his keynote address at the Expo annual Consumer Electronics in Las. Vegas.
Nvidia has soared past a $3 trillion market capitalization from demand for its AI chips to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. Huang, for his part, has become a household name more than 30 years after he founded Nvidia as a graphics chip company for video games.
Massive lines had formed outside the Mandalay Bay convention center long before the keynote began, with some people still in line when Huang took the stage in a sleek version of his leather jacket, saying: “At the end I’m in Las Vegas lately.”
Outside of semiconductors, Nvidia has built the software that allows companies to train and deploy robots, from those used in smart factories and warehouses to self-driving cars and humanoids, driving the expansion of use cases for the AI that runs on its chips.
Collapsing the technological challenges involved in deploying robots at scale will pave the way to “the biggest tech industry the world has ever seen,” Huang said.
Nvidia said the field of robotics had reached a technological tipping point, as AI accelerates and streamlines the process of simulating the physical world and generating the vast amounts of data needed to train robots. In the next two decades, the market for humanoid robots alone is expected to reach $38 billion, according to the company.
On Monday, Nvidia announced a set of basic AI models in its new Cosmos platform, which developers can use for free to generate data and build their own models.
Nvidia said the foundational models, which it said were trained on 20 million hours of video data, were as fundamental a technological development as the large language models that underpin applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It pairs with Nvidia’s Omniverse platform, which is used to run simulations of the physical world.
“What (those models) are doing for language, we can now do for understanding the physical world,” Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia’s vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology, told the Financial Times. While data on the physical world is much more difficult to collect and process than text, Lebaredian said it “is a necessary part” of the company’s mission.
“The big takeaway (from Huang’s CES speech) is that this moment will be a special moment,” he added. “I think this year is a tipping point where we’re going to see this acceleration of physical AI and robotics.”
The Omniverse platform and robotics currently represent a small portion of the company’s overall revenue. For Nvidia’s quarter to the end of October, “professional virtualization” accounted for $486 million in revenue, while automotive and robotics accounted for $449 million.
That’s a fraction of overall sales, as the company raked in $30.8 billion in revenue from the sale of data center chips that power AI models in the same period.
Nvidia’s search for new markets comes as it faces increasing pressure from its biggest customers, including Amazon and Microsoft, which are rushing to build their own AI data center chips.
Bank of America analysts said Nvidia’s decision to double down on “Physical Artificial Intelligence” was the “next logical step.” The challenge would be in “making products reliable enough, cheap enough and widespread enough to create credible business models,” they added.
At CES, Nvidia also unveiled a collection of foundational blueprints for humanoid robots, called the “GR00T Blueprint,” which it said will “supercharge” robot development, as well as new tools for developing and testing fleets of factory robots and storage and. autonomous vehicle training.
Toyota announced that it would build its next generation of autonomous vehicles on Nvidia hardware and software, known as Drive AGX. Self-driving car group Aurora and auto parts maker Continental will use Nvidia hardware and software to power thousands of driverless trucks under their long-term strategic partnership with the chip maker.
Nvidia said it expected its automotive business to grow to $6 billion in fiscal 2026. Autonomous vehicles “will be the first multi-trillion dollar robotics industry,” Huang told the CES audience.
Separately, Nvidia said it would release a “personal AI supercomputer” with its latest and most powerful AI chip, Blackwell, allowing researchers and students to run multibillion-parameter AI models locally and not through the cloud. It will be available in May with a starting price of $3,000.
