The unprecedented demand for AI chips has made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of $3.8 trillion. But CEO and founder Jensen Huang said the company has developed its origins. “We no longer regarded ourselves as a bargaining company a long time ago,” Huang said at NVIDIA’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday (June 25).
Instead, Huang saw the future of Nvidia in the “physical AI” of artificial intelligence, which can reason and operate in the real world. This emerging field could power self-driving vehicles, humanoid robots and radical changes in the workforce. “Robots and all the AI infrastructure that trains them will be the next multi-million dollar industry,” Huang said.
AI chips are still the core of Nvidia’s business. Founded more than 30 years ago by Huang, the company started as a gaming-centric joint venture and was an early pioneer in graphics processing units (GPUs). Its early bet on GPU computing made the cycling wave of AI triggered entirely by Openai’s launch of Chatgpt. Since then, NVIDIA has become a huge power in Silicon Valley, with technology companies scrambling to secure their high-performance hardware.
A surge in demand has driven record sales. Nvidia generated $130.5 billion in revenue last year, with its latest quarterly sales of 69% year-on-year to $44.1 billion. Much of this revenue still comes from its data center division, but its automotive and robotics divisions are growing rapidly. Between February and April, the sector brought in $567 million, a 72% increase from the same period last year.
As AI enters its physical age, Huang believes that Nvidia’s growth has just begun. The technology has developed through the stages of perception, power generation and recent reasoning. Now, “the next wave is here,” he said.
Huang said the next wave will start with self-driving cars. NVIDIA bets on the transformation through its drive platform, a suite of computing and infrastructure tools for self-driving cars. Leading robotics and transport vehicle companies are already using the platform, and partners like Mercedes-Benz plan to roll out technology to millions of cars.
Nvidia is also expanding its footprint in robotics. It has partnered with major players such as Boston Dynamics, Kuka and Universal Robots. Earlier this year, the company launched Cosmos, a set of “world models” designed to train physical AI systems such as humanoid robots through advanced physics-based simulations.
NVIDIA bets that the economic potential of physical AI is both broad and untapped, especially in the capacity to change the global workforce. Huang pointed out that autonomous machines can reshape the world’s industrial sector, which together generates $500 trillion in global GDP. His confident Nvidia can lead this transformation. “We are working to build the future of billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of millions of robot factories, all powered by Nvidia Technology,” he said.
