Nvidia Targets Physical AI With New Jetson Edge Platform

Jetson Orin modulesNvidia

Nvidia introduced the Jetson Orin Nano 2, a new edge AI platform designed to build robots, drones, and vision AI systems in real time, as the vendor continues to push physical AI into the real world.

The platform, unveiled on Tuesday and expected to be available in the first half of 2027, is based on a new version of Nvidia's Ampere architecture silicon. Nvidia said Cognex, Doosan Bobcat and Matic are initial customers.

Nvidia says the Nano 2 offers twice the performance of the previous generation, or up to 40% lower energy consumption at the same performance.

In a media briefing, Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at Nvidia, said the release responds to model accuracy reaching a “tipping point.”

“What used to take a large data center and many GPUs, now can be run on Nvidia Jetson,” he said. “We can now achieve the same frontier accuracy as the largest models from last year.”

This increased accessibility of high-performance AI models bodes well for the robotics industry and, Talla said, is finally making sophisticated physical AI practical at the edge.

“Robotics is a three-computer problem,” he said. “The first computer is where we do all the training of intelligence, and the second computer in the middle is where we do all the testing and policy evaluation. The last computer, the third computer, is the runtime or the robot brain, and that's Nvidia Jetson.”

Nvidia says the Orin Nano 2 can run the latest small and medium-sized language and vision-language models in real time. Talla pointed to Nvidia's own Nemotron models as an example, noting that its latest Nemotron 3.5 Lightning can run at around 115 tokens per second on Jetson.

That performance is enabled not only by hardware improvements, but also by advances in model training. Talla attributed the progress to better training data, improvements in model architecture and the ability to use larger models to train or distill smaller ones.