Created for humanoid robots and edge operations, NVIDIA launches Jetson AGX Thor Development Kit

To showcase the extreme expansion of GPU manufacturer NVIDIA (NVIDIA) in the robotics field, the company officially launched its new generation of Jetson AGX Thor development kit, which is now in the market, with a price of US$3,499 (about NT$106,000).

According to NVIDIA, this super computing processor specially designed for advanced robots and edge AI applications not only symbolizes that NVIDIA has taken an important step in popularizing high-performance AI, but also provides developers with unprecedented powerful tools to build humanoid robots and various autonomous systems. Currently, the development kit is now available in the global market, showing the continuous growth of NVIDIA's business machine with its aggressive layout of physical AI.

NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor's core driving force, its built-in T5000 system single chip, can demonstrate a shocking 2,070 TOPS AI performance at 130 watts at FP4 accuracy, compared to its predecessor Jetson Orin, which has increased AI computing power by 7.5 times and energy efficiency by 3.5 times. Such great computing power, which provides the core power of future humanoid robots in key tasks such as real-time perception, precise navigation and complex decision-making, is expected to bring revolutionary changes to manufacturing, medical care and even more extensive industries. In addition, NVIDIA will also launch a single chip version of the built-in T4000 system, with power consumption close to 70 watts, suitable for handling smaller jobs and computing power of 1,200 TOPS.

In addition, the module integrates the cutting-edge Blackwell architecture, which can simultaneously perform deeper intelligent control of vision, language and multiple sensor data in handling multimodal AI. It is worth mentioning that unlike traditional data center GPUs, Thor is optimized and can still output data center-level performance in low-power environments, which has a significant meaning for accelerating the deployment of autonomous machines in energy-constrained environments such as warehouses and hospitals. Its early adopters Agility Robotics Inc., Amazon Robotics LLC, Boston Dynamics Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Figure AI Inc., Hexagon AB, Medtronic plc and Meta Platforms Inc., etc.

NVIDIA notes that the current launch of Thor is highly accurate in its strategy. Because of the fierce competition in the current AI hardware market, NVIDIA positioned Thor as the brain of the next generation of robots, suggesting that it may lead to explosive growth in the development industry like generative AI. NVIDIA executive chief Huang Rensheng has closed on important venues such as CES 2025 and has been strengthening the robotics business to become NVIDIA's next important growth engine after AI. Huang Ren predicts that the scale of the robotics business will be comparable to NVIDIA's existing AI business in the future, and its cooperation with major industry manufacturers such as Tesla and Boston Power has further strengthened NVIDIA's kingly attitude in this market.

For a large community of developers, Thor's true value lies in its rich and sound ecological system. The development kit provides software support through NVIDIA's mature Isaac platform, ensuring that developers can easily integrate with simulation tools and pre-training robot models, greatly simplifying the robot training process. What's more important is that it fully supports NVIDIA's GR00T basic model tailored for humanoid robots. This model can efficiently convert robot prototypes at the laboratory stage into real world applications. This not only significantly reduces the scope of robot development, but also hopes to achieve popularization of robot development, so that small enterprises can also compete fairly with large industrial factories by leveraging pre-built AI frameworks.