Nvidia (NVDA) is looking to maintain its hot streak from 2024 to 2025 with several AI-centric announcements at CES in Las Vegas on Monday. CEO Jensen Huang took the stage during the company's keynote, laying out his vision for everything from the AI system that will power robots and self-driving cars to a new AI computer the size of your desk.
Nvidia's stock price jumped as much as 4.7% ahead of Monday's keynote as Wall Street braced for the AI darling's latest offering. The company's stock is up 205% over the past 12 months thanks to its investments in AI hardware and its CUDA software, which allows developers to use its chips to run AI programs.
The latest announcements focus on how programmers can use Nvidia's existing hardware, its Hopper and Blackwell platforms. The company may unveil the next-generation chip during its GTC conference in March.
During Monday's event Huang showed off Nvidia's new Blackwell-based chip, the GB10 superchip. A pint-sized version of the GB200 superchip, which includes a Grace central processing unit (CPU) and two Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs). The small GB10 is compatible with Grace CPU and Blackwell GPU.
Nvidia says the chip will be available in a small desktop system called Project DIGITS and will come with 128GB of memory and 4TB of storage. The company says the setup is powerful enough for researchers interested in “prototyping, fine-tuning, and running large-scale AI models.”
Project DIGITS will start at $3,000 and will be available in May from Nvidia and its OEM partners.
Apart from its new chip and desktop, Nvidia also released its Cosmos open license platform for developing portable AI systems. The platform uses world-based models, or WFMs, which are AI models that simulate situations in the real world. Wearable AI systems include technologies such as humanoid robots and self-driving cars.
The idea is for companies to use Cosmos to help develop the software needed to operate robots and self-driving cars, by simulating various use cases in a virtual environment without using expensive robots or putting cars on the road in the real world.
“ChatGPT's era of robots is coming,” Huang said in a statement.
“Like large language models, world base models are important for robotics and AV development, yet not all developers have the expertise and training resources of their own,” Huang explained. “We created Cosmos to democratize virtual AI and put generic robotics within the reach of all developers.”
In addition to Cosmos, Nvidia released its Isaac GROOT Blueprint for training humanoid robots. The software, which connects to Apple's Vision Pro headset, allows the engineer to perform and record specific movements they want to teach the robot. Isaac GROOT Blueprint then takes those movements and synthesizes them, giving the robot a large set of movements based on the original action of the engineer.
Developers often teach humanoid robots to move by making repetitive movements that the bot can follow and understand on its own. It's usually a time-consuming affair, but with the Isaac GROOT Blueprint, Nvidia says developers will be able to reduce the time needed to create plans for the future of human robots.
On the automotive front, Nvidia has announced that Toyota will begin using the company's DRIVE AGX Orin chip and Nvidia DriveOS operating system to power advanced driver assistance features in its next-generation vehicles.
Nvidia also said it has entered into an agreement with car company Continental and self-driving truck company Aurora that will see the transportation companies use Nvidia's DRIVE hardware and software DriveOS and Aurora's level 4 driver system called Aurora Driver. Continent and Aurora plan to bring autonomous cargo trucks to the roads from 2027.
Nvidia's Automotive and Robotics segments still make up a small portion of its total revenue. In Q3, the division brought in $449 million compared to its Data Center business, which brought in $30.8 billion on revenue of $35.1 billion. That said, Automotive and Robotics is growing, with sales up 72% year-over-year in the quarter.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaking at the CES 2025 conference.
Finally, Nvidia announced a number of AI software and hardware offerings, including AI Blueprints, AI applications that will allow developers to build and launch their own custom AI agents.
AI agents are specialized AI systems that can perform multi-step tasks across different applications. Companies like Google and Microsoft are betting big on AI agents as the next big change in business and consumer AI because of their ability to automate many common tasks like importing information from emails to spreadsheets.
Nvidia also said that users using their latest RTX graphics cards will now be able to launch base models using its Nvidia NIM platform. In fact, the company is enabling AI capabilities on standard graphics cards through its NIM service, which should open up a wide range of opportunities for software developers, helping it pay more customers going forward.
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