Jensen Huang’s Microduck moment: 20,000 preorders for an open-source home robot

At Nvidia’s GTC Berlin keynote, Jensen Huang played on stage with a group of small Microduck robots that walked, sat, flopped over for a nap and did somersaults on voice command, TechCrunch reports. The clip spread quickly, and by the next day Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said preorders had passed 20,000 units, with delivery expected in time for Christmas. Promotional videos show adults playing with the robots too, and Delangue has suggested Microduck could become the best-selling robot of the year, not only for kids.

The Microduck comes from Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face acquired in 2025. Nvidia bought Hugging Face in September, so the robot is now part of the Nvidia family. It is Hugging Face’s second robot after Reachy Mini, also pitched as a small, approachable open-source device.

The Microduck is open source and was trained in simulation on Nvidia’s stack to learn its basic moves, and Pollen says owners can teach it new tricks and share them with everyone. That is a sensible route into homes: start small and harmless, give hobbyists something to tinker with, and let a community build the behavior library. Personal computers grew up the same way, through enthusiasts first.

It also clarifies Nvidia’s strategy. Nvidia sells the chips and simulation tools that train robots and has been pushing open robotics software such as Isaac ROS (Isaac ROS 5.0) and small local models for robots (Nemotron 3.5 Bolt). Owning Hugging Face, and through it a consumer robot with a fan base, puts Nvidia at both ends: the software that teaches machines to move and a device people want on the coffee table. Twenty thousand preorders is small next to the toy business but a real number for a robot, and it buys an audience that will train and share behaviors no company could script.

Preorders are not deliveries, and holiday hardware deadlines slip. A shared library of tricks is only as good as its moderation; open communities can share broken or unsafe behaviors. And a voice-commanded robot in a living room is a microphone in a living room, so buyers deserve clear answers on what it hears, what it keeps and where that goes, especially now that it sits inside one of the most powerful AI companies. More in our Nvidia coverage and robotics coverage.