Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Pushes Robot Revolution in Taiwan Tech Speech

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlighted robots — again — at a Taiwan tech conference Sunday.
• He predicted mass production of self-driving cars and humanoid robots in the coming years.
• Nvidia makes software and hardware for robots.

Jensen Huang really loves robots.

The Nvidia CEO paraded nine human-like robots onstage earlier this year. He highlighted them again in a Sunday speech at a Taiwan tech conference, saying two kinds of robots in particular would be “very high volume.” These, he said, would be self-driving cars and humanoid robots.

“The next wave of AI is physical AI. AI that understands the laws of physics. AI that can work among us,” said Huang, wearing his signature black jacket. “Everything is going to be robotic. All of the factories will be robotic. The factories will orchestrate robots and those robots will be building products that are robotic.”

The chip giant Nvidia has much to gain from wide robot adoption: Its software and hardware can be used in the production, training, and ongoing use of robots.

The company built an operating system for self-driving cars, and Huang said Sunday that it would start producing cars in a partnership with Mercedes next year.

Nvidia also created an operating system for robots to learn in virtual environments. Huang said that before robots worked in the physical world, their systems could be refined in a “robot gym,” where they could fine-tune everything from motor skills, such as grasping objects, to navigating environments, such as moving around warehouses.

“The easiest robot to adapt into the world are humanoid robots because we built the world for us. We also have the most amount of data to train these robots than other types of robots because we have the same physique,” Huang said.

In March, he said building models for robots was “one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today.”

The company is also investing in robot startups, such as by pledging $50 million to Figure AI, which is building robots for dangerous warehouse jobs.

“This isn’t the future. This is happening now,” Huang said on Sunday.

Nvidia’s stock is up 180% in the past year.