Editor's take: As exciting as generative AI may be, there is another AI-powered technology on the near-term horizon that could prove even more impactful: robotics, or as Nvidia's Jensen Huang and others have begun calling it, physical AI. The concept of physical AI is that many of the same algorithmic principles used to create large language models for text-based interactions can be applied to learning and replicating physical movements in the real world.
Nvidia has offered robotics-focused hardware platforms and software for more than a decade, but its latest release, the Nvidia Jetson AGX Thor platform (now generally available), marks a significant step forward. For the first time, the company's latest Blackwell GPU compute architecture is being brought into both industrial and consumer robotics, including humanoid systems.
Traditionally, Nvidia's robotics platforms have lagged behind its most advanced GPUs. The previous robotics platform, Jetson Orin, was released two years ago and based on the older Ampere architecture, which had first appeared more than three years ago. With the new release, however, Nvidia has finally aligned robotics with its most advanced AI compute engine, the Blackwell GPUs. This represents the first time every one of Nvidia's vertical offerings is leveraging its latest chips.
Because of the generational leap, performance improvements are substantial. Nvidia claims the Jetson T5000 production module delivers a 7.5-times increase in AI computing power and a 3.5-times improvement in energy efficiency compared to Jetson Orin.
More important than the raw performance gains are the new types of applications the platform enables. Nvidia believes the Jetson AGX Thor will make possible a range of humanoid-style robots suited for commercial use and, eventually, consumer markets.
Nvidia is offering several versions of the Jetson Thor platform. A development kit priced at $3,499 includes a Jetson T5000 board and multiple I/O ports. The T5000 board on its own costs $2,999 and features a 14-core Arm Neoverse V3AE CPU, 128 GB of memory, up to 2,070 TOPS for FP4 calculations, and a 130-watt power draw.
Later this fall, Nvidia will release the T4000, priced at $1,999, with a 12-core Arm Neoverse V3AE CPU, 32 GB of memory, 1,200 TOPS of performance, and a 70-watt power draw. Each Thor platform also includes the new Blackwell Multi-Instance GPU (MIG), which allows the GPU to be divided into multiple virtual parts to handle a wide range of robotic activities and sensor inputs quickly and consistently.
Nvidia Jetson Thor
In addition to hardware, Nvidia is expanding its robotics software ecosystem. The Nvidia Jetson software platform has been updated to support these new boards, and the company's Isaac Groot humanoid robot foundation models and Nvidia Metropolis for Vision AI are among the tools being integrated.
Of course, when it comes to robots-particularly for consumer applications-there are a huge number of issues to think about beyond just the enabling technology.
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