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Nvidia is on the cusp of revolutionising robotics through artificial intelligence, chief executive Jensen Huang said on Monday, as he outlined his vision for the next stage of the company’s staggering growth.
Huang announced a range of new products and partnerships in the “physical AI” space, including AI models for humanoid robots and a major deal with Toyota to use Nvidia’s self-driving car technology, during his keynote speech at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Nvidia has flown past a $3tn market capitalisation off the back of demand for its AI chips to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. Huang in turn has become a household name, more than 30 years after he founded Nvidia as a video game graphics chip company.
Massive queues had formed outside the Mandalay Bay convention centre long before the keynote started, with some people still lining up when Huang emerged onstage in a sparkly version of his trademark leather jacket, quipping: “I’m in Las Vegas after all.”
Outside semiconductors, Nvidia has been building the software that allows companies to train and deploy robots, from those used in smart factories and warehouses to self-driving cars and humanoids, pushing to expand the use cases for AI running on its chips.
Cracking the technological challenges involved in deploying robots at scale will pave the way to “the largest technology industry the world has ever seen”, said Huang.
Nvidia said the field of robotics had reached a technological tipping point, as AI accelerates and fine-tunes 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 $38bn, according to the company.
On Monday, Nvidia announced a suite of foundational AI models on its new Cosmos platform, which developers can use for free to generate data and build their own models.
Nvidia said the foundation models, which it said were trained on 20mn hours of video data, were as fundamental a technological development as the large language models that underpin apps 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 for Omniverse and simulation technology, told the Financial Times. While data on the physical world is much harder to gather and process than text, Lebaredian said “it’s a necessary part” of the company’s mission.
“The big takeaway [from Huang’s CES speech] is that this moment is going to be a special one,” he added. “I think this year is an inflection point where we’re going to see this acceleration of physical AI and robotics.”
The Omniverse platform and robotics currently represent a small share of the company’s overall revenue. For Nvidia’s quarter to the end of October, “professional virtualisation” accounted for $486mn of revenue, while automotive and robotics totalled $449mn.
This is a sliver of overall sales, as the company raked in $30.8bn in revenue from selling chips for the data centres that power AI models in the same period.
Nvidia’s search for new markets comes as it faces growing pressure from its biggest customers, including Amazon and Microsoft, which are rushing to build their own in-house AI data centre chips.
Bank of America analysts said Nvidia’s decision to double down on “physical AI” was the “next logical step”. The challenge would be in “making the products reliable enough, cheap enough and pervasive enough to spawn credible business models”, they added.
At CES, Nvidia also unveiled a collection of foundation models for humanoid robots, called the “GR00T Blueprint”, which it said would “supercharge” the development of robots, as well as new tools for developing and testing fleets of factory and warehousing robots and training autonomous vehicles.
Toyota announced it would build its next generation of autonomous vehicles on Nvidia’s hardware and software, known as Drive AGX. Self-driving car group Aurora and automotive parts maker Continental will use Nvidia’s hardware and software to power thousands of driverless trucks under their long-term strategic partnerships with the chipmaker.
Nvidia said it expected its automotive business to grow to $6bn in the 2026 fiscal year. Autonomous vehicles “will be the first multitrillion-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 rather than through the cloud. It will be available in May at an initial price tag of $3,000.
Nvidia shares were flat in after-hours trading on Monday but have risen more than 11 per cent since the start of the year, putting it within striking distance to overtake Apple as the most valuable US-listed company.
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