It was definately a fascinating close for the GTC keynote. Probably veering pretty off-topic for Saul’s, but it is a new direction for NVIDIA and likely to turn into some success over the coming next few years. But Data Center is what any investors today should care about – industrial digitization, autonomous auto & robotics, and now humanoid robotics are all later waves to come. All are nascent, and this one especially so. However, unlike those other new directions, I do think humanoid robotics could grow much more quickly and really hit the mainstream before those other waves.
There were 9 humanoid robots that rose onto the stage (and that “Jensen Huang” bot that joined them), but NVIDIA mentioned they are working with 12 partners overall.
Tesla’s Optimus bot was not among them, and is not likely to be using this system. The “brain” of Tesla’s bot are its own SoC design. If it isn’t based on NVIDIA then it is not as likely to be using NVIDIA’s new GR00T-based platform. (Though Omniverse Cloud does have other benefits, including physics-based simulation engines that might still be useful even w/o using Jetson chips.)
I just wrote up a bit on this new NVIDIA’s new humanoid robot platform my GTC post: NVIDIA's GTC announcements
- Omniverse Cloud was extended into becoming an end-to-end platform for the coming wave of humanoid robots, including the new GROOT robotic AI, Jetson Thor robotic controller modules, and Osmo controller & AI integrator (syncs the centralized AI to the robot’s AI).
If you are curious, the robots on stage w/ Jensen were: Figure 01, Unitree H1, Apptronik Apollo, Agility Digit, (Human Jensen), Sanctuary Phoenix, 1X Neo, Fourier GR-1, Boston Dynamics Atlas, Xpeng PX5.
-muji