Nvidia chief calls robots ‘multitrillion-dollar’ opportunity

Unlock Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Nvidia is set to revolutionize robotics with artificial intelligence, Chief Executive Jensen Huang said Monday, as he outlined his vision for the next phase of the company’s staggering growth and predicted a “multitrillion-dollar” opportunity.

During his keynote speech at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Huang announced several new products and partnerships in the “physical AI” space, including AI models of humanoid robots and a major deal with Toyota to use Nvidia’s self-driving car technology. Vegas.

Nvidia It has surpassed $3tn market capitalization on the back of demand for its AI chips to become one of the world’s most valuable companies More than 30 years after Nvidia’s founding as a video game graphics chip company, Huang has become a household name.

Huge queues formed outside the Mandalay Bay Convention Center long before the keynote began, with some people still queuing when Huang appeared on stage in a flashy version of his trademark leather jacket, quipping: “I’m in Las Vegas.”

Beyond semiconductors, Nvidia is developing software that lets companies train and deploy everything from robots used in smart factories and warehouses to self-driving cars and humanoids, expanding the use cases for AI running on its chips.

Cracking the technical challenges involved in deploying robots at scale will pave the way for “the biggest tech industry in the world,” Huang said.

According to Nvidia, the field of robotics has reached a Technological tipping pointAs AI accelerates and fine-tunes the process of simulating the physical world and generates huge amounts of data needed to train robots. Within 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 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 20 million hours of video data, were as fundamental to a technological development as the large language models that underpin apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is associated with Nvidia’s Omniverse platform, which is used to run simulations of the physical world.

“What [those models] doing it for language, we can now do it for understanding the physical world,” Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia’s vice-president for Omniverse and Simulation Technologies, told the Financial Times. Although data from the physical world is much more difficult to collect and process than text, Laboredian says “it’s a necessary part of the company’s mission.”

“The big takeaway [from Huang’s CES speech] 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 portion of the company’s overall revenue. For Nvidia’s quarter to the end of October, “professional virtualization” generated $486mn in revenue, while automotive and robotics totaled $449mn.

That’s a sliver of overall sales, as the company made $30.8bn over the same period selling chips for data centers that power AI models.

Nvidia’s search for new markets comes as it faces growing pressure from its biggest customers, including Amazon and Microsoft, which are rushing to develop their own in-house AI data center chips.

Analysts at Bank of America said Nvidia’s decision to double down on “physical AI” was the “next logical step”. The challenge, they added, will be “making the products reliable enough, cheap enough and pervasive enough to create a credible business model”.

At CES, Nvidia also unveiled a collection of foundation models for humanoid robots, called the “GR00T Blueprint,” which it said will “supercharge” development of the robots, as well as new tools to develop and test fleets of factory and warehouse robots and autonomous vehicles. training

Toyota has announced that it will build its next-generation autonomous vehicle on Nvidia hardware and software, called Drive AGX. Self-driving car group Aurora and automotive parts maker Continental Chipmaker will use Nvidia’s hardware and software to power thousands of driverless trucks under their long-term strategic partnership.

Nvidia said it expects 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 will release its latest and most powerful AI chip, Blackwell, a “personal AI supercomputer” that will allow researchers and students to run multibillion-parameter AI models locally rather than through the cloud. It will be available in May at a starting price tag of $3,000.