Nvidia declares “ChatGPT moment” for robotics at CES

Nvidia has released a new suite of open physical AI models, robotics frameworks and computing platforms, as global partners including Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar and LG Electronics unveiled next-generation robots at CES 2026.

Speaking at the event in Las Vegas, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the robotics industry has reached a turning point, describing it as “the ChatGPT moment for robotics”.

“Breakthroughs in physical AI – models that understand the real world, reason and plan actions –  are unlocking entirely new applications,” he said.

“Nvidia’s full stack of Jetson robotics processors, Cuda, Omniverse and open physical AI models empowers our global ecosystem of partners to transform industries with AI-driven robotics.”

The announcements span the entire robot development lifecycle, with Nvidia positioning its latest releases as a way to accelerate the creation of “generalist-specialist” robots capable of learning and performing many tasks, rather than being limited to single functions.

New models for robotics

Central to this push is the release of several new open models, now available on Hugging Face. These include Nvidia Cosmos Transfer 2.5 and Cosmos Predict 2.5, designed to support synthetic data generation and robot policy evaluation in simulation for physical AI. Then there’s Cosmos Reason 2, a vision language model that enable machines to see, understand and act in the physical world like humans.

Nvidia also introduced Isaac GR00T N1.6, a vision language action model built specifically for humanoid robots, offering full-body control and contextual understanding. Robotics companies including Franka Robotics, Neura Robotics and Humanoid are already using GR00T-enabled workflows to simulate, train and validate new robot behaviours.

To support large-scale testing and deployment, Nvidia released two new open-source frameworks on GitHub. Isaac Lab-Arena provides a collaborative system for robot policy evaluation and benchmarking in simulation, while OSMO is a cloud-native orchestration framework designed to simplify robotics workflows across on-premise and cloud environments. OSMO is already being used by developers such as Hexagon Robotics and is integrated into Microsoft Azure’s Robotics Accelerator toolchain.

Nvidia and Hugging Face collaboration

Nvidia also expanded its collaboration with Hugging Face, integrating Isaac and GR00T technologies into the LeRobot open-source robotics framework to streamline end-to-end development for the open-source community.

On the hardware front, Nvidia announced the Jetson T4000 module, powered by the Blackwell architecture, touted to be four times the performance of the previous generation. The company also revealed new deployments of its Jetson Thor platform by Neura Robotics for its Porsche-designed Gen 3 humanoid and Richtech Robotics for its launch of Dex, a mobile humanoid designed for industrial environments. 

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