nvidia: Self-driving cars and automated warehouses? Nvidia’s Jetson Thor is powerful robot brain for next-gen AI robots

AI chip giant Nvidia has launched a powerful new “brain” for robots, known as the Jetson Thor module. Nvidia’s new $3,4999 robot “brain” aims to make humanoid machines as quick-thinking and sure-footed as experienced workers. It delivers 7.5x more AI compute, 3.1x more CPU performance and 2x more memory than its predecessor, the NVIDIA Jetson Orin.

Jetson Thor is the powerful new robotics supercomputer promises to act as the brain of the next generation of AI-powered humanoid robots and can be installed in production-ready robots made by Amazon or Meta.

“This performance leap will enable roboticists to process high-speed sensor data and perform visual reasoning at the edge — workflows that were previously too slow to run in dynamic real-world environments. This opens new possibilities for multimodal AI applications such as humanoid robotics,” Nvidia said in a blog post.

Nvidia’s Jetson Thor is a high-powered chip designed to make robots learn faster, react smarter, and fit right into everything from automated warehouses to self-driving cars and even hospital operating rooms.

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Nvidia’s new “brain” for robots

Nvidia has 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. NVIDIA Jetson T5000 modules are available starting at $2,999 for 1,000 units.

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Powered by the company’s top-end Blackwell chips, Nvidia says Jetson Thor promises “unmatched performance and scalability” to deliver a massive amount of power needed to run generative AI models. “The powerful edge processing offered by Jetson Thor will take Digit to the next level — enhancing its real-time responsiveness and expanding its abilities to a broader, more complex set of skills,” said Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics. “With Jetson Thor, we can deliver the latest physical AI advancements to optimize operations across our customers’ warehouses and factories.”ALSO READ: US’ fastest train is here: Amtrak’s NextGen Acela to launch service between DC, Boston and NYC. Check prices and dates

Jetson Thor is built for generative reasoning models. It enables the next generation of physical AI agents — powered by large transformer models, vision language models and vision language action models — to run in real time at the edge while minimizing cloud dependency, the company said.

Optimized with the Jetson software stack to enable the low latency and high performance required in real-world applications, Jetson Thor supports all popular generative AI frameworks and AI reasoning models with unmatched real-time performance. These include Cosmos Reason, DeepSeek, Llama, Gemini and Qwen models, as well as domain-specific models for robotics like Isaac GR00T N1.5, enabling any developer to easily experiment and run inference locally.

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“Jetson Thor modules also run the full NVIDIA AI software stack to accelerate virtually every physical AI workflow with platforms including NVIDIA Isaac for robotics, NVIDIA Metropolis for video analytics AI agents and NVIDIA Holoscan for sensor processing,” Nvidia revealed in the blog post.

The new chip is capable of running generative AI models like Chatgpt or Gemini and is designed to run real-time robotic applications that require fast processing of data from multiple sensor.

Is Jetson Thor US firm’s biggest growth opportunity?

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang sees this humanoid agent as the US firm’s biggest growth opportunity in the coming years. “We’ve built Jetson Thor for the millions of developers working on robotic systems that interact with and increasingly shape the physical world.”

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The Jetson Thor family includes a developer kit and production modules. The developer kit includes a Jetson T5000 module, a reference carrier board with abundant connectivity, an active heatsink with a fan and a power supply. The Jetson ecosystem supports a variety of application requirements, high-speed industrial automation protocols and sensor interfaces, accelerating time to market for enterprise developers, the company said.

“Thousands of software companies can now elevate their traditional vision AI and robotics applications with multi-AI agent workflows running on Jetson Thor. Leading adopters include Openzeka, Rebotnix, Solomon and Vaidio. More than 2 million developers use NVIDIA technologies to accelerate robotics workflows. Get started with Jetson Thor by reading the NVIDIA Technical Blog and watching the developer kit walkthrough,” it added.

The Jetson Thor chips come with 128 GB of memory, making them ideal for running large AI models. The company highlights their potential use in self-driving cars, particularly for vehicles from Chinese manufacturers. Beyond automotive applications, Jetson Thor is gaining traction in top research labs, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Zurich, where it powers autonomous robots for medical research and other autonomous tasks.

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