Nvidia shares jumped 1.7% on Tuesday to a new all-time high after CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company's next family of gaming chips and hinted that robotics technology is on the verge of ramping up.
Huang unveiled the latest chips for desktop and laptop computers during his keynote address Monday evening at CES in Las Vegas, the massive technology trade show featuring the latest gadgets, and promised better-quality images.
The stock, which had already risen to a new high on Monday before the CEO's speech, was trading at $151.94 as of Tuesday around 9:30 a.m.
Huang said the GeForce RTX 50-series chips use the same Blackwell architecture as the company's AI processors — and are twice as fast as their predecessors. The chips will come pre-installed on computers costing between $550 and $2,000 that will begin shipping in March, the company said.
“Can you imagine, Blackwell, you have this amazing graphics card — I'm going to shrink it down and put it there,” Huang said, holding up a laptop.
CES 2025 featured more robots and AI features than ever before — and Nvidia's longtime CEO has hinted that advanced robot infrastructure is coming soon.
“The ChatGPT moment for public bots is just around the corner,” he said Monday night.
He said he has introduced an AI model called Cosmos that can produce training videos for robots and self-driving cars, significantly reducing the costs of current training methods.
He added: “All the enabling technologies that I talked about will enable us in the next few years to see very rapid breakthroughs, surprising breakthroughs in the field of robotics in general.”
Nvidia's market capitalization has risen to more than $3.5 trillion over the past few years – surpassing Apple to become the world's most valuable company in November 2024.
For most of its existence, since its launch in the early 1990s, Nvidia has been known for selling graphics processing units, or graphics processing units (GPUs), used to make video games. Its first chip was made in 1999 to draw triangles and polygons for 3D games.
But Nvidia has reached new heights by selling AI chips to cloud vendors and technology giants including Microsoft, Meta and Google, outpacing rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. Its dominance of the AI market has led to increased regulatory scrutiny by watchdog groups in the United States, Europe, South Korea and China.
Now, game sales represent just a drop in Nvidia's portfolio. In the quarter ending in October, gaming sales accounted for less than 10% of Nvidia's total revenue — compared with 88% from data center chips.
But the newly announced RTX 50 series chips are dedicated to gaming, with higher frame rates, the ability to show more detail on character faces, and improved graphics and higher-resolution images.
The new generation of gaming chips will include a variety of configurations. The RTX 5090 – the most powerful, and therefore most expensive of the bunch – will retail for $1,999 each. Nvidia said it is twice as fast as its predecessor, the RTX 4090, with 92 billion transistors.
The chips will be optimized to run AI models, so creators can incorporate generative AI into their video games.
Nvidia said the chips can also run large language models and image generation models from companies like Meta.
Nvidia's gaming business increased 15% over last year, although it was overshadowed by explosive growth in AI chip sales. The company's data center sales have doubled for six straight quarters to reach more than $30 billion in the latest quarter.
“Even though we are now an AI company as well as a gaming company, our gaming side still benefits greatly from the fact that we are an AI company,” Justin Walker, senior product manager at Nvidia, said on a press call.
