Robots stole the show
GTC floor featured 110+ AI robots and demos from Disney’s Olaf via the Newton physics engine to entertainment‑focused humanoids like Unitree’s R1 — the latter went viral and is priced at about $6k (x.com)(x.com). The demos underscore NVIDIA’s push to connect cloud models to physical robotics and synthetic‑data workflows (x.com).
NVIDIA’s GTC ran March 16–19 in San Jose and drew more than 30,000 attendees to a program of roughly 900–1,000 sessions and partner exhibits. (nvidia.com) Walt Disney Imagineering’s free‑roaming Olaf walked onstage during Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote on March 16 and is scheduled to debut inside the World of Frozen at Disneyland Paris on March 29. (disneyexperiences.com) Newton — billed as an open‑source, GPU‑accelerated physics engine co‑developed by Disney Research, Google DeepMind and NVIDIA — is now hosted under the Linux Foundation and its code and changelog are publicly available on GitHub. (linuxfoundation.org) Unitree’s official product page lists the R1 AIR at $4,900 and the standard R1 at $5,900, with the company and multiple industry trackers reporting pre‑orders and first shipments slated for April 2026. (unitree.com) NVIDIA pushed the show’s theme that robotics is becoming a “sim‑to‑real” engineering problem — promoting Isaac Sim and cloud orchestration tools for large‑scale synthetic‑data pipelines and new robot foundation models (GR00T) to close the gap between virtual training and physical robots. (developer.nvidia.com)
