Nvidia introduced a $3,499 Jetson Thor developer kit intended as a robot "brain" that begins shipping next month. Jetson Thor runs on top-end Blackwell chips to bring generative and agentic AI out of distant data centers and onto factory floors, warehouses, hospitals, and farms. The company reports up to 7.5x higher AI compute and 3.5x better energy efficiency versus its predecessor. The system enables robots to perceive surroundings and respond in real time, supporting quick-thinking, sure-footed performance in physical tasks. The developer kit is positioned as a scalable foundation for advanced automation and human-like robots.
When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivered the keynote address at the company's annual GTC conference in March, he outlined the "four waves" of the AI revolution: perception AI was the first wave, which started about 10 years ago and focused on recognizing speech and classifying images. Generative AI, the second wave that's dominated the past five years and characterized by large-language models like ChatGPT, creates text and images based on predictive patterns.
The company announced a new "brain" for robots: a $3,499 developer kit that starts shipping next month. The company's stock rose slightly on the news, and has leaped higher as of Tuesday morning. Powered by the company's top-end Blackwell chips, which are sought-after by most countries trying to build AI at scale, Nvidia says Jetson Thor promises "unmatched performance and scalability" to deliver a massive amount of power needed to run generative AI models.
Compared to this chip's predecessor, Jetson Thor "provides up to 7.5x higher AI compute and 3.5x better energy efficiency," according to the company. The entire system is pitched as a foundation for robots that can perceive their surroundings and respond in real time, a capability Nvidia frames as essential for the next leg of AI adoption in the physical world.
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