Nvidia (NVDA) continues to ride the AI wave as cloud giants Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) snatch up as many of its data center chips as they can.
And while shares of the chip company are off 10% year to date, they’re still up 27% over the past 12 months and more than 700% since 2023. Revenue is also soaring, jumping from $27 billion during the company’s fiscal 2023 to $130 billion in fiscal 2025.
But during Nvidia’s GTC event last week, CEO Jensen Huang repeatedly made the case for the company’s next major AI innovation: robotics. Huang is looking to use Nvidia’s digital AI prowess to grow what he calls physical AI, including self-driving cars and humanoid robots.
“We are … world class with robotic safety. I believe this expertise is going to pay off big someday,” the CEO said during a press briefing during the conference.
“We’ve been investing in this area for 10 years now. It’s a multibillion-dollar business for us already … and I think this is going to be one of the largest businesses for the company long term,” Huang added.
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A quick tour of Nvidia’s GTC showcase at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center offered a glimpse at Nvidia’s robotics ambitions, with exhibits ranging from robotic arms to human-size bipedal robots.
On one side of the large hall, the company displayed its own prototype of a robotic ultrasound machine as an example of how businesses can take advantage of its technologies.
The voice-activated bot included a single mechanical arm with a camera and scanner. When I told it to perform a liver scan, it quickly located the organ on a dummy torso and performed the procedure. A display mounted behind the setup showed the live results, which I can only assume is what a liver looks like on an ultrasound.
I’m a reporter, not a doctor.
In the next stall, Agility Robotics showed off its Digit robot as it grabbed items off a faux store shelf and put them into a shopping basket, completing the task over and over again like some kind of Sisyphean nightmare. A litany of other robotic arms and a Boston Dynamics Spot were also on display at the event.
Huang is banking on robot makers relying on a three-computer system that Nvidia has developed to train and run the machines.
The first system includes Nvidia’s DGX AI systems, which customers use to develop AI robot models. Then there’s the Nvidia Omniverse system, which customers use to train their robotic models to navigate the real world in a virtual setting.
