Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that in less than five years, humanoid robots will be widely used, "wandering around you".
"Humanoid robots literally wandering around you are closer than ever. It could be less than five years," Huang said at the GTC 2025 event in San Jose, California, after announcing a series of new products.
According to Nvidia CEO, manufacturing will be the first area to adopt humanoid robots, because this industry has well-defined tasks and robots can handle them in controlled environments. "I think it should be brought to factories first. The reason is that this scope is much more tightly protected, and the use cases are also much more specific," said Mr. Huang.
At GTC 2025, he introduced a series of new flagship products from Nvidia, including the GR00T N1. The company calls the model "the world's first open humanoid robot platform", equipped with a "dual" system that allows robots to think fast and slow - an element quite similar to reasoning AI models. In which, "System 1" is the fast-thinking action model, reflecting human reflexes or intuition, while "System 2" is the slow-thinking model to make deliberate, methodical decisions.
The “skeleton” for the GR00T N1 includes Newton, an open-source physics engine developed with Google DeepMind and Disney Research and is built for robotics. It can easily generalize common tasks such as grasping, moving objects with one or two hands and transferring from one hand to the other, or performing multi-step tasks that require long contexts and combine common skills together such as material handling, packaging and inspection.
Regarding the price of humanoid robots, Mr. Huang said it was “very easy to determine”. According to him, in the factory, each one costs “probably $100,000 per year”, which he said was “quite economical”.
Humanoid robots are considered a new arena for technology giants. Besides names like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI from the US or Unitree, AgiBot from China, many other companies have begun to encroach on the research field. In February, Reuters reported that Meta would focus on developing “humanoid robots to maximize the capabilities of Llama’s platform.” That same month, Bloomberg reported that Apple was “exploring a humanoid machine that showcases Apple’s AI and closely integrated technology.”
“The ChatGPT moment for robots is here,” Huang said at CES 2025 in Las Vegas in January, predicting that AI would move beyond just data processing and into the real world.
The rush by companies large and small to build humanoid robots has investors on edge. In recent weeks, US investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into startups that specialize in building AI robots related to logistics, such as elderly care or industrial robots for warehouses. According to PitchBook, US venture capitalists pumped $6.1 billion into robotics in 2024, up 19% from the previous year and more than 144% since 2019.
“I think the physical world is the next frontier that we’re going to conquer and break,” said Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital. “I think there will be a lot of winners in robotics.”