Nvidia CEO says robotics is chipmaker's biggest opportunity after AI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that, other than artificial intelligence, robotics represents the chipmaker's biggest market for potential growth, and that self-driving cars would be the first major commercial application for the technology.

"We have many growth opportunities across our company, with AI and robotics the two largest, representing a multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity," Huang said on Wednesday, at Nvidia's annual shareholders meeting, in response to a question from an attendee.

A little over a year ago, Nvidia changed the way it reported its business units to group both its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. In May, Nvidia said that the business unit had $567 million in quarterly sales, or about 1% of the company's total revenue. Automotive and robotics was up 72% on an annual basis.

Nvidia's sales have been surging over the past three years due to unyielding demand for the company's data center graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used to build and operate sophisticated AI applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Total sales have soared from about $27 billion in its fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion last year, and analysts are expecting nearly $200 billion in sales this year, according to LSEG.

The stock climbed to a record on Wednesday, lifting Nvidia's market cap to $3.75 trillion, putting it just ahead of Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.

While robotics remains relatively small for Nvidia at the moment, Huang said that applications will require the company's data center AI chips to train the software as well as other chips installed in self-driving cars and robots.

Huang highlighted Nvidia's Thrive platform of chips, and software for self-driving cars, which Mercedes-Benz is using. He also said that the company recently released AI models for humanoid robots called Cosmos.

"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.

Nvidia has increasingly been offering more complementary technology alongside its AI chips, including software, a cloud service, and networking chips to tie AI accelerators together. Huang said Nvidia's brand is evolving, and that it's better described as an "AI infrastructure" or "computing platform" provider.

"We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago," Huang said.

At the annual meeting, shareholders approved the company's executive compensation plan and reelected all 13 board members. Outside shareholder proposals to produce a more detailed diversity report and change shareholder meeting procedure did not pass.

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