Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) surged on Tuesday, climbing past its 52-week high of $184.55 and becoming the first company to reach a $4.5 trillion market capitalization, as major tech firms continue to pour resources into artificial intelligence initiatives.
The company’s latest advancements include the open-source Newton Physics Engine, now integrated into Nvidia Isaac Lab, and the release of the open Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1.6 reasoning vision language action model for robot skills.
These technologies, along with new AI infrastructure, create an open, accelerated robotics platform that enables developers and researchers to rapidly iterate, standardize testing, and unify training with on-robot inference.
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The goal is to help robots safely and reliably transfer skills from a simulated environment to the real world.
Developed in collaboration with Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google DeepMind, The Walt Disney Company’s (NYSE:DIS) Disney Research, and Nvidia, Newton is built on the Nvidia Warp and OpenUSD frameworks.
The beta release of this GPU-accelerated physics engine aims to overcome the limitations of current physics engines, which struggle to simulate the complex movements of humanoid robots.
Furthermore, the latest Isaac GR00T N1.6 model will soon be available on Hugging Face and will integrate Nvidia Cosmos Reason, a customizable reasoning vision language model for physical AI.
This model, described as the robot’s deep-thinking brain, translates vague instructions into detailed, step-by-step plans, allowing robots to generalize across new situations and tasks.
With this upgrade, humanoid robots can now move and handle objects simultaneously, facilitating more complex actions like opening heavier doors.
These developments are taking place against a backdrop of surging AI infrastructure spending.
Citing aggressive investments by hyperscalers and growing enterprise adoption, Citigroup recently lifted its forecast for AI-related infrastructure spending by Big Tech giants to over $2.8 trillion through 2029, a significant increase from its prior estimate of $2.3 trillion.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that the AI boom, sparked by the debut of ChatGPT in late 2022, has driven unprecedented capital expenditures and large-scale data center expansion.
Citi now projects hyperscalers like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Alphabet to invest $490 billion into AI infrastructure by the end of 2026, up from its earlier forecast of $420 billion.
Analysts noted that these companies are likely to reflect this incremental spending in their third-quarter earnings calls, positioning their guidance ahead of visible enterprise demand.
The brokerage also projected that global AI compute demand would require 55 gigawatts of additional power capacity by 2030, equating to a whopping $2.8 trillion in incremental investment, with $1.4 trillion of that in the U.S. alone.
Citi added that the costs are immense, with each gigawatt of compute capacity carrying a price tag of about $50 billion.
Big Tech firms are no longer funding these outlays solely from profits, the report added. Instead, they are increasingly turning to borrowing, a shift already evident in financials as spending eats into free cash flow.
Price Action: NVDA stock was trading higher by 2.24% to $185.92 at last check Tuesday.
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