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NVIDIA is on the cusp of revolutionizing robotics through artificial intelligence, CEO Jensen Huang said Monday, as he outlined his vision for the next phase of the company's incredible growth and forecast a “billion-dollar” opportunity.
Huang announced a host of new products and partnerships in the field of “physical AI,” 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. Vegas.
Nvidia Its market capitalization has surpassed $3 trillion on the back of demand for its AI chips, becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. Huang, in turn, has become a household name, more than 30 years after he founded Nvidia as a video game graphics chip company.
Huge lines had formed outside the Mandalay Bay Convention Center long before the keynote began, and some people were still queuing when Hwang appeared on stage wearing a shiny version of his signature leather jacket, joking: “I'm in Las Vegas, after all.” .
Beyond semiconductors, Nvidia is building software that allows companies to train and deploy robots, from those used in smart factories and warehouses to self-driving cars and humanoid robots, driving expanded use cases for the artificial intelligence that runs on its chips.
Overcoming the technological challenges involved in deploying robots on a large scale will pave the way for “the largest technology industry the world has ever seen,” Huang said.
Nvidia said that the field of robotics has reached a level Technological turning pointArtificial intelligence works to speed up and fine-tune the process of simulating the physical world and generating huge amounts of data necessary to train robots. In the next two decades, the humanoid robots market alone is expected to reach $38 billion, according to the company.
Nvidia on Monday announced a set 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 underlying models, which it said were trained on 20 million hours of video data, were as fundamental a technological advance as the large language models that power applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's paired with Nvidia's Omniverse platform, which is used to run simulations of the physical world.
“What (these models) do for language, we can now do to understand the physical world,” Pastor Lepardian, Nvidia's vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology, told the Financial Times. While collecting and processing data about the physical world is much more difficult than collecting textual data, Libaridian said “it's a necessary part” of the company's mission.
“The big takeaway (from Huang's speech at CES) is that this is going to be a special moment,” he added. “I think this year is an inflection point where we will see this acceleration in physical AI and robotics.”
The Omniverse platform and robotics currently represent a small share of the company's total revenue. For NVIDIA's quarter through the end of October, “professional virtualization” accounted for $486 million in revenue, while automotive and robotics revenue totaled $449 million.
This represents a small portion of total sales, as the company generated $30.8 billion in revenue from selling chips to data centers that power AI models in the same period.
Nvidia's search for new markets comes as it faces increasing pressure from its largest customers, including Amazon and Microsoft, which are rushing to build their own in-house AI data center chips.
Bank of America analysts said Nvidia's decision to double down on “physical AI” was “the next logical step.” The challenge, they added, will be to “make products reliable enough, cheap enough, and ubiquitous enough to produce credible business models.”
At CES, Nvidia also unveiled a set of basic prototypes for humanoid robots, called the “GR00T Blueprint,” which it said will “catalyze” robotics development, as well as new tools for developing and testing fleets of robots in factories and warehouses. Self-driving vehicle training.
Toyota announced that it will build its next generation of self-driving vehicles using 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 self-driving trucks under their long-term strategic partnerships with the chip maker.
Nvidia said it expects its automotive business to grow to $6 billion in fiscal 2026. Self-driving vehicles “will be the first multi-trillion-dollar robotics industry,” Huang told the CES audience.
Separately, Nvidia said it will launch a “personal AI supercomputer” equipped with its latest and most powerful AI chips, Blackwell, allowing researchers and students to run AI models with billions of parameters locally rather than in the cloud. It will be available in May for an introductory price of $3,000.
