Unprecedented demand for A.I. chips has propelled Nvidia to become the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of $3.8 trillion. But CEO and founder Jensen Huang says the company has already evolved beyond its origins. “We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago,” Huang said during Nvidia’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday (June 25).
Instead, Huang sees Nvidia’s future in “physical A.I.,” a branch of artificial intelligence that can reason and operate in the real world. This emerging field could power self-driving vehicles, humanoid robots and sweeping changes in the workforce. “Robots, and all the A.I. infrastructure to train them, will be the next multimillion-dollar industry,” Huang said.
A.I. chips remain core to Nvidia’s business. Founded by Huang more than three decades ago, the company started as a gaming-focused venture and was an early pioneer in graphics processing units (GPUs). Its early bet on GPU computing positioned it perfectly to ride the A.I. wave triggered by OpenAI’s 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Since then, Nvidia has become a Silicon Valley powerhouse, with tech firms scrambling to secure its high-performance hardware.
That surge in demand has fueled record-breaking sales. Nvidia generated $130.5 billion in revenue last year, and its most recent quarterly sales soared 69 percent year-over-year to $44.1 billion. Most of that revenue still comes from its data center division, but its automotive and robotics segment is growing rapidly. Between February and April, the unit brought in $567 million, up 72 percent from the same period last year.
As A.I. moves into its physical era, Huang believes Nvidia’s growth is just beginning. The technology has already advanced through stages of perception, generation and, more recently, reasoning. Now, “the next wave is already coming,” he said.
That next wave, Huang predicts, will begin with autonomous vehicles. Nvidia is betting big on this shift through its Drive platform, a suite of computing and infrastructure tools for self-driving cars. The platform is already in use by leading robotaxi and delivery vehicle companies, with partners like Mercedes-Benz planning to roll out the technology across millions of vehicles.
Nvidia is also expanding its footprint in robotics. It has formed partnerships with major players such as Boston Dynamics, KUKA and Universal Robots. Earlier this year, the company introduced Cosmos, a set of “world models” designed to train physical A.I. systems, such as humanoid robots, through advanced, physics-based simulations.
Nvidia is betting that the economic potential of physical A.I. is both vast and largely untapped, particularly in its ability to transform the global labor force. Autonomous machines could reshape the world’s industrial sectors, which collectively generate $50 trillion in global GDP, Huang noted. He’s confident Nvidia is positioned to lead that transformation. “We’re working toward a future with billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories—all powered by Nvidia technology,” he said.
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