NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has highlighted robotics, alongside artificial intelligence, as a key growth area for the chipmaker. He emphasized that autonomous vehicles will be the first major commercial application of this technology. During NVIDIA's annual shareholder meeting, Huang noted that AI and robotics represent trillion-dollar growth opportunities.
NVIDIA recently merged its automotive and robotics business units, reporting quarterly sales of $567 million, about 1% of its total revenue. This segment saw a 72% year-over-year increase. Over the past three years, NVIDIA's sales have surged due to strong demand for its data center GPUs, which are crucial for AI applications like OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to LSEG, NVIDIA's total sales skyrocketed from approximately $27 billion in fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion last year, with analysts projecting sales to approach $200 billion this year.
NVIDIA's stock recently hit an all-time high, with a market cap reaching $3.75 trillion, slightly surpassing Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company. Although the robotics business is currently small, Huang noted that related applications will require NVIDIA's AI chips for data centers and other chips for autonomous vehicles and robots.
NVIDIA is expanding its offerings beyond AI chips to include software, cloud services, and networking chips for AI accelerators. Huang stated that NVIDIA is evolving into an "AI infrastructure" or "computing platform" provider.
