Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on Wednesday that robotics is now the company’s second-biggest focus after AI, with autonomous vehicles set to lead the charge.
He made the comments during Nvidia’s annual shareholder meeting, according to CNBC, saying both AI and robotics are “multitrillion-dollar growth opportunities” that will shape the company’s direction.
This announcement comes while Nvidia’s total revenue is exploding, driven mostly by the continued demand for its data center GPUs. Those chips power major AI tools like ChatGPT, and now Nvidia is planning to use the same tech for robots and self-driving cars.
A year ago, Nvidia reorganized its business segments and placed automotive and robotics under a single reporting line. Last quarter, that combined unit brought in $567 million, making up just 1% of total revenue, but it grew 72% year-over-year, showing exactly why Jensen is focusing on it now.
The expansion into robotics isn’t a pivot, it’s a buildout, and Jensen confirmed that training and deploying robotics software will need Nvidia’s AI chips, both in the cloud and on physical hardware like cars and humanoid robots.
Jensen pushes robots powered by AI chips
During the meeting, Jensen pointed to Nvidia’s Drive platform, already used by Mercedes-Benz for autonomous driving systems. He also said Nvidia has developed a suite of AI models for humanoid robots, under a project 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,” Jensen said.
The company is already supporting these efforts by bundling more than just chips. Jensen said Nvidia no longer considers itself a chip company, and instead operates as an AI infrastructure platform.
That means they’re also building software, cloud services, and networking hardware to connect their AI chips into full-scale systems. The data center segment, which is the company’s biggest driver, saw 73% year-over-year growth, and Nvidia’s full-year revenue is now projected to rise 53% to nearly $200 billion.
Still, Nvidia is facing real problems outside the U.S., especially in China, where sales have effectively stopped.
In April, the Trump administration, now back in the White House, introduced stricter rules that banned exports of Nvidia’s H20 AI processor, a chip specifically made to comply with earlier restrictions. Nvidia later confirmed that the new policy will cost them $8 billion in lost sales, along with a $4.5 billion inventory write-off.
Export bans hit China business as Nvidia tops $3.77T
Jensen didn’t hold back in describing the impact. “The $50 billion China market is effectively closed to U.S. industry,” he said last month. And the situation may get worse. Another rule is already in the works that would expand the list of banned AI chip exports, again targeting the Chinese market.
Despite that, Nvidia’s stock is surging. On the same day as the meeting, shares climbed over 4%, closing at a record $154.31, beating the previous all-time high from January 6. That move pushed Nvidia’s market cap to $3.77 trillion, putting it just ahead of Microsoft, and making it the most valuable public company in the world. Apple came in third with a $3 trillion valuation.
At the same meeting, shareholders voted to approve the executive compensation plan and re-elected all 13 board members. However, proposals asking for a deeper diversity report and updates to how meetings are run both failed to pass. But the real story wasn’t governance, it was about what comes next.
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