Nvidia’s Big Ambitions to Solve Manufacturing Shows Slow Returns So Far

In the past two years, Nvidia’s business of selling chips for AI has rocketed into the stratosphere, lifting the company’s revenue to nearly $148 billion in the nine months through October, up from $27.5 billion for the same period in 2023. But CEO Jensen Huang isn’t satisfied. Perpetually worried about threats to his business, Huang has been prodding his team to build a business selling chips and software to design robots and solve manufacturing problems—a venture that could be a future source of growth.

The software, which runs exclusively on Nvidia chips, helps people design and simulate digital twins of real-world objects, such as a car or piece of machinery. Huang has said that these tools, known as Omniverse, could allow Nvidia to capture a slice of the $50 trillion manufacturing and logistics industries. But after four years of effort, Nvidia’s attempts to turn the Omniverse software into a money-making business have made little progress, according to four current and former Nvidia employees familiar with the business.