Nvidia stock was gaining early Thursday. The chip maker is looking to get more attention on its initiatives in robotics as investors assess a diversifying artificial-intelligence chip market.
The shares were up 1.2% at $202.74 in premarket trading. But the stock is down 15% over the past month through to Wednesday's close.
"Nvidia shares have taken a tumble with the broader tech complex as expectations of higher US interest rates blow the froth off the market. However, the stock was already trading off its highs, largely due to the perception that the chip giant was ceding ground to some of its other global semiconductor competitors," said Kyle Rodda, market analyst at Capital.com.
Over the past year, Nvidia's share move has lagged far behind semiconductor peers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, which have gained on excitement about the uses of their central-processing units for AI inference -- the process of running models.
But if Nvidia isn't the sole champion of the current stage of AI, it's hoping to reclaim the top spot with the growth of physical AI -- an industry term covering robots, autonomous vehicles, and other autonomous machines.
Nvidia was one of the investors in a funding round of up to $1.4 billion for Germany's Neura Robotics, announced on Wednesday. The robotics company said the funding will help it scale production to several million robots by 2030.
That's just one of multiple partnerships and investments Nvidia has made in the robotics sector. Nvidia recently announced plans to accelerate development of humanoid robots in a collaboration with Chinese start-up Unitree. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the time that humanoid robots were a "multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity."
Although robotics is currently a small business compared with AI data centers, Barron's has noted that Wall Street is betting on explosive growth. RBC analyst Tom Narayan projects some 350 million robots will be sold annually, at an estimated $25,000 each, by 2050. That would be a market worth $9 trillion.
Nvidia was a recent Barron's stock pick when it was trading around $226.
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