Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said in his CES 2026 talk that self-driving cars will soon be one of the biggest industries in the world, and the rest of the robots won’t be far behind.
He said that entire AI stack is being reinvented. You no longer program the software. You train the AI. Computing has been fundamentally reshaped as a result of AI. Every layer of the cake has been reinvented. A couple of hundred billion of VC investment is going into it. And $100 billion of R&D budgets is going into AI methods from classical methods.
“Which explains why we are so busy,” Huang said.
He noted 2025 was an incredible year, with the changes in scaling laws. In 2017, transformers came. In 2022, the ChatGPT moment happened. Then the first reasoning model, 01, from ChatGPT came. Now there is test time scaling, or thinking in real time. Each phase requires an enormous amount of compute.
Meanwhile, he said a breakthrough happened in 2024 with agentic systems. AI became agentic. You can simulate outcomes. Plan futures. Solve very important problems. Cursor revolutionized how Nvidia did its own programming.
Physical AI is becoming more important, where AI interacts with nature, or the physical world. And you have AI that understands the laws of physics. And the advancement of open models blossomed as well.
“Open models really took off last year,” he said.
DeepSeek 01 caught the world by surprise and activated this entire movement to open model systems, he said. Nvidia is now launching its Open Model Ecosystem like Clara, Earth-2, Nemotron, Cosmos, GR00T and Alpamayo.
In the enterprise, he also said enterprise AI is being revolutionized by agentic AI systems. Nvidia has created a full-stack physical AI platform. Simulation is at the heart of everything Nvidia does, Huang said. Omniverse is for digital twin simulations. Cosmos is a foundation model of the physical world. And there are the GR00T and Alpamayo AI models.
They’re all getting the world ready for the new era of physical AI, Huang said. Alpamayo is Nvidia’s model for driving self-driving cars. Huang said the model layer is Alpamayo, and this whole stack — a multilayered cake — will be in the road in 2026, he said.
And he said Alpamayo will be the brains of the world’s safest car, and they will be on the road in 2026, he said. It will be the first large-scale physical AI market and it is fully here now, he said.
“This is already a giant business for us. They use it to train their models,” he said.
The next journey after that will be robots. He invited some cute humanoid robots on stage with him.
He noted the demand for Nvidia GPUs and AI is skyrocketing.