Nvidia's CEO sees a future with 'billions of robots'

 Nvidia is about more than just AI, says CEO Jensen Huang: Robotics, including self-driving cars, are the company’s other multi-trillion-dollar bet, he told shareholders on Wednesday, as reported by CNBC. 

This month Nvidia briefly surpassed Microsoft as the most valuable public company in the world. And even though its wild success is based on chips that are at the forefront of the AI revolution, Huang said that Nvidia “stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago." He says it is now just as focused on AI infrastructure, like networking chips and cloud services.

“We’re working towards a day where there will be billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories that can be powered by Nvidia technology,” Huang said.

Earlier in June, Nvidia announced a partnership with Hexagon, a company that makes humanoid robots “engineered to perform a wide range of industrial applications.” On Wednesday Jensen mentioned Nvidia’s work with another humanoid robot company, Cosmos. 

Toyota (TM) will use Nvidia’s DRIVE AGX Orin system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology for its next-generation vehicles for driving assistance. Aurora (AUR) and Continental will both use Nvidia’s DRIVE accelerated compute to deploy driverless trucks through a long-term strategic partnership. 

In May, Nvidia’s automotive and robotics division reported a 27% jump in revenue from the previous year, to $567 million. That’s peanuts in a company that just reached an all-time-high stock price, with a market cap of $3.75 trillion—with a T. Sales of its AI chips quadrupled in the past two years, with analysts expecting sales to increase by 53% this year to $200 billion.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Huang said that “the ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner.” There, he unveiled new tools to help companies simulate and deploy robot workforces. The centerpiece is “Mega,” a new Omniverse Blueprint that lets companies develop, test, and optimize robot fleets in virtual environments before deploying them in real warehouses and factories.

A key part of this effort is the new Isaac GR00T Blueprint, which helps solve a major challenge in robotics: generating the massive amounts of motion data needed to train humanoid robots. Instead of the expensive and time-consuming process of collecting real-world data, developers can use GR00T to generate large synthetic datasets from just a small number of human motions

That said, the CEO is cashing out: Huang unloaded $14.4 million of his own stock in Nvidia this June; he’s expected to sell up to $865 million worth by the end of 2025. 

— Britney Nguyen and Jackie Snow contributed to this article.