Yahoo Finance

Nvidia continues to ride the AI wave as cloud giants, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, scoop up as many of its chips as they can. But during Nvidia's GTC conference last week, CEO Jensen Wong repeatedly made the case for the company's next major AI innovation, and that would be robotics. Joining us now is Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley.

That's right, Josh. I got to walk the floor of GTC last week, and really, you know, outside of that, when Jensen took the stage during his keynote, he basically said, look, this is the future of AI. He called it physical AI, and he's talking about bipedal humanoid robots, those mechanical arms, uh as well as self-driving cars. He lumps that in that category as well. And Nvidia's been in there for a while, he pointed out that it's a multi-million dollar business for them, but they want to go even further. And so I was walking around. I saw Agility Robotics digit robot there, kind of in this uh terrible routine of picking up things and putting it down, and then picking them up and bringing them back where they were, um as well as a prototype that Nvidia's engineers have put together, not something they're looking to sell, but just an example of what their technology could do of an arm that essentially was a robotic ultrasound. And you would just say, okay, you would talk into it and say, scan the liver. And it was a disembodied model torso, and it would just scan over this thing, find where the liver is, I guess. I'm not a doctor. And then give you a readout. So this is where the company sees things going, and they they call it a three computer system. They they started with their DGX system, their huge supercomputers for developing these AI models, then training them in their simulators, and their Omniverse. That's a second computer. And then the third computer is their Jetson Thor computer for robots that everything kind of runs on. Think of it kind of like the robot's brain. And so that's what they're pushing as the future of AI, where they see all of this development eventually going. And according to Jensen Wong, you know, we're already starting to see some robots in production, in companies. Agility Robotics is one of them. They have their digit on the floor helping with some logistics in a factory. And then over time, we'll start to see those. He says he says that's really where they'll kick off just because it's easier to keep them from, you know, more guard rails, easier to keep them from falling over, bumping into people, you know, that's where it'll be. And then eventually, you know, perhaps we'll see them in the real world along with those self-driving cars.

Let me ask quickly on Nvidia, because there were some reports today that got attention, which kind of raised questions about the future of its chips in China, Dan. What did you make of those headlines?

Yeah, I mean, it feels like this is kind of the the continuing tit for tat. Basically, this is China saying that they have new efficiency standards, and that Nvidia's H20 chips don't meet those standards. And so the issue here is that things like Deepseek were developed on the H20. Those are chips that Nvidia can actually sell in China. And so that's really going to be an issue for them. They don't expect China to grow as far as revenue goes, though, you know, like the US does, just because of those kind of export controls from the US, and now they have these issues.

And finally, we still expect Trump, right, to impose tariffs on chips as well. What does that mean for tech products looking ahead?

Yeah, I mean, they could get more expensive. What the issue here is, it's going to be on the semiconductor, not the product itself. Depends on how they lay this out. But there's a lot of semiconductors inside your phone, your computer. You have a chip for your modem, a chip, you know, CPU. You have GPUs in some computers, memory chips. So it depends on how this is all laid out. The long and short of it is, they travel in and out of different countries from their start to finish, these semiconductors. If you're hitting it every time it goes through a border, that's a big deal. And then if you hit it afterwards, when it's a finished product, that's an even bigger problem. It's either going to go to the semiconductor makers, the device makers, the stores, or us. And so there's going to be a lot of kind of back and forth, but this is a lot more complicated than putting a tariff on French wine. This is a multi-step process, it's multiple borders, and so it'll be interesting to see how this kind of all shakes out. I just don't want my video games to be more expensive.

No, none of us want that, Dan. Dan Howley, thank you, my friend. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Josh.