Wednesday's stock rally sent Nvidia (NVDA, Financial) shares surging 3.3%, driven higher by a broader tech sector surge after four banks reported stronger earnings than expected. The latest strategic investment by Nvidia shows its bravery towards industrial AI and robotics.
The chip giant has also provided Taiwan's MetAI with capital in its $4 million seed funding round, making Nvidia its first investment in a Taiwanese company. Kenmec Mechanical Engineering, Solomon Technology, SparkLabs Taiwan, Addin Ventures, and Upstream Ventures were other participants in the funding round.
MetAI builds AI-powered digital twin platforms for its own advanced semiconductor manufacturing facilities, smart warehouses, and automation systems. It converts a CAD file into a stripped-down “SimReady” 3D environment within minutes to ease the time to market digital twins for industrial applications.
As generative physical AI is an area of increasing focus, Nvidia's partnership with MetAI is a holistic approach to the integration of predictive physical AI that can be trained in simulation environments to deploy robots in autonomous systems. Later this year, the company launched its Mega framework within the Omniverse platform to further digital twin products in the company's broader AI ecosystem.
CEO and co-founder of MetAI Daniel Yu said that digital twins have slowed physical AI down in the past because they took so long to be developed. MetAI's hope is to ramp this up, creating synthetic data in its AI-powered digital twin environments.
