Nvidia CEO pitches robotics, cars as growth areas to consumer-electronics audience

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang held forth at a consumer-electronics showcase in Nevada on Monday, touting his inroads in AI agents, self-driving cars and robotics on a day when his company’s valuation reached its highest level.

Taking the stage at the annual CES conference in Las Vegas, Huang showed “physical AI” tools that he said would help robots learn using simulated environments that closely mimic the real world. That could bring more automation to warehouses and factories and boost a humanoid-robot market that the company said could be worth $38 billion in the next couple of decades.

“The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” he said, flanked by a lineup of more than a dozen humanoid robots. He was referencing the explosion of interest in AI following the release of OpenAI’s chatbot more than two years ago.

In the address, which followed a trading session that sent Nvidia’s value to $3.66 trillion, Huang also highlighted how the company was fast making inroads in the auto industry.

He said Nvidia reached a deal to provide driver-assistance chips and software for future Toyota vehicles, adding to a list of automotive partners that include Mercedes and Volvo. He forecast the company’s automotive revenue at $5 billion in its next fiscal year, which begins late this month, up from about $4 billion this year.

The company reports automotive revenue in its financial results, and brought in $1.1 billion in its last full fiscal year, but Huang’s $5 billion figure included sales of other products and services to the industry.

Among Huang’s other announcements:

• Nvidia will make a personal AI supercomputer called Project DIGITS. It will be a desktop computer with a version of its latest Blackwell AI chip inside, and will start at $3,000. The computers are aimed at AI researchers and data scientists, allowing them to work on AI models without having to tap Nvidia’s cutting-edge AI chips housed in data centers.
• New AI “blueprints” that make it easier to create and deploy AI agents to do things such as analyze video feeds and generate blog posts. One of Nvidia’s blueprints has users feed in multiple PDF files from which it creates a podcast “narrated in a natural voice,” according to a company release.
• A new generation of graphics chips for videogamers. The hardware, which costs up to about $2,000, enhances resolution and framerates for the most demanding games in part by leveraging AI, executives said. The chips are to be available for desktop computers this month, with laptops coming in March.

Write to Asa Fitch at asa.fitch@wsj.com