During Nvidia’s quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang said agentic AI had reached “an inflection point” and that AI agents were “solving real problems.”
The company’s powerful chips have been at the heart of the AI boom in recent years, particularly for their use in data centers, so much so that Nvidia’s annual revenue for fiscal 2026 reached $216 billion, up 65% from the previous year.
Huang called Nvidia an AI infrastructure company, a dramatic evolution from the graphics card company it started as.
The term Agentic AI has been around for a while, but the technology is now becoming available for real-world use. Unlike chatbots, which stay within their own boundaries to produce text, images or code, AI Agents can take specific actions – for example planning and booking a vacation – without someone constantly giving them orders.
In a live event just hours before Nvidia released its results, Samsung revealed its new Galaxy S26 range phones, spending a lot of time talking about the “agentic AI experience” they will deliver.
On Nvidia’s call, Huang said the world had “awakened to agentic inflection” and that it had only happened in the last two or three months. He also said he thinks the next inflection point will be physical AI, a term that describes the integration of artificial intelligence into machines, including self-driving cars and robots.
Robots had a big presence at CES earlier this year, the big show for consumer electronics. Companies have shown them off by doing everything from fold clothes to serve as companions in managing work on the assembly line.
We should hear a lot more about what to expect from Nvidia at its GTC conference in March. It will likely have more to say about its AI-focused Rubin chip, and might also be ready to dabble in laptop chip territory.
