They will also drive up the economy & create new job opportunities
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has praised robots as “AI immigrants” that could help solve the global labour shortage hampering the manufacturing industry.
He spoke in a 90-minute keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 to 200 journalists and analysts, with about 130,000 attendees at the Las Vegas Hotel on Jan 5.
At the conference, he highlighted that the next major leap in artificial intelligence will be its industrialisation—scaling AI for mass real-world deployment.
Huang also emphasised the rise of “physical AI,” in which systems can understand and interact with the physical world rather than operating solely in software, unveiling NVIDIA Cosmos 2’s open-world foundation models trained on videos, robotic data, and simulations to help AI systems perceive and act in real-world environments.
As with previous years, robots are a major presence at CES, with companies hoping they will finally break into the mainstream as practical devices rather than mere novelties.
AI & robots will “create jobs”
During a Q&A session after his keynote speech, the CEO deliberately likened robots to “AI immigrants”—just as human migrants have historically filled labour shortages, robots are beginning play a similar role.
Huang, who leads NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalisation of about US$3.5 trillion, estimated that the current worker shortage is in the “tens of millions,” and will only worsen with “population decline.”
He argued that humans will no longer be able to sustain the world’s economies. As such, having “AI immigrants” will fill labour shortages in the manufacturing industry that humans “decided not to do anymore.”
When asked if there would be job losses due to artificial intelligence and robots, Huang countered that, instead, they could generate new opportunities and employment.
I think the robotics revolution is going to replace the labour loss and drive up the economy. And when the economy increases, we hire more people. There are a lot of jobs that won’t be replaced by AI for a very long time.
His remarks echo those of other Silicon Valley leaders, including Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, who often point to population decline and an ageing workforce as key drivers for adopting automation.
NVIDIA, in turn, is pouring resources into building the foundational software needed to make robots functional across sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and healthcare.
The CEO also stated that he anticipates robots achieving human-level abilities “this year,” with advancements in locomotion, articulation, and fine motor skills.
“We don’t just use our eyes, we also use touch,” he said. “And the robot only has eyes, so it needs to have touch, and so those fine motor skills are hard to develop, but we’re developing technology in that area, and I know the rest of the industry is doing so as well.”
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