Nvidia Shows Microduck on GTC Berlin Stage, Generates 20,000 Preorders in One Day

Last week, during the GTC Berlin keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang did what seemed like a stage act: he brought four Microducks — small bipedal robots 25 centimeters tall produced by Pollen Robotics (acquired by Hugging Face in 2025 and, since September, by Nvidia) — to the Tempodrom, the arena where the event takes place in Berlin. The robots sat, stood up, lay down for a "nap" (three fell over, the fourth stayed on its feet — which Huang called "distraction"), and performed somersaults on voice command.

The video went viral on social media. The next day, Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, confirmed on social media that Microduck preorders had surpassed 20,000 units. The robot costs $399 and deliveries are scheduled before Christmas 2026 in North America and Europe.

What is the Microduck

The Microduck is a 25 cm, under-800-gram bipedal robot with 15 degrees of freedom, a front camera, 8x8 LiDAR, two IMUs, microphones, a speaker, NFC, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. It ships with pre-programmed behaviors: it walks, sits, crouches, does somersaults, and recovers from falls on its own. It can also be controlled with a game controller and supports accessory connections via NFC.

Unlike a conventional toy, its target audience is AI developers and researchers. The software is entirely open-source, and owners can train new tricks through simulations and share them with the community.

Nvidia's strategy behind the duck

The Microduck is not an Nvidia product — it is a Hugging Face product that runs entirely on Nvidia's hardware and software stack. The training pipeline is as follows: AI agents set up a course in Isaac Sim simulation, send training jobs to cloud supercomputers, and bring the learned policy back to RTX Spark for evaluation before deploying to the physical robot.

This is, literally, the full cycle of modern robotics: simulation, cloud training, hardware deployment. And Nvidia controls every step.

When Nvidia acquired Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in September, the Microduck automatically became an Nvidia product. The company already had the Reachy Mini — another robot from Hugging Face — and now the Microduck completes the consumer hardware line for AI developers.

Why 20,000 preorders matter

The Microduck had already been introduced in August 2026 (Axios, CNBC) with sales surpassing $5 million in three days. But it was the 20,000 orders generated by the GTC Berlin video that showed its true potential: Jensen Huang, one of the most respected technology executives globally, appears on stage at a serious corporate conference playing with robotic ducks and the world simply falls in love.

It is the same phenomenon that led Apple to transform the iPod into a cultural icon — but applied to robotics. The difference is that the Microduck is not a closed product like the original iPhone; it is an open platform. Any developer can download the software, train new behaviors, and share them with the community. That creates a network effect that Apple products will never achieve.

The accessible robotics ecosystem

The Microduck fits into a broader movement toward accessible robotics. Since 2025, various startups and academics have produced low-cost robots for research: the Open Duck Mini from EmoLo, robots from Noble Machines (which already delivered its first model to a Fortune 500 client), and the Reachy Mini from Hugging Face itself. The Microduck stands out by combining accessible hardware with a fully open training pipeline.

IEEE Spectrum noted that the combination of 15 motors, sensors, and open-source software makes the Microduck one of the most accessible platforms for students and developers to test AI behaviors in physical robotics. Instead of spending millions on an industrial robot arm, you can buy a Microduck, train behaviors in Isaac Sim, and have results in days, not months.

The question that remains

Nvidia already dominates data centers, GPUs, and generative AI. With the Hugging Face acquisition and the strategy behind the Microduck, the company is entering the consumer robotics market. 20,000 preorders in a single day are not just pretty numbers — they are a signal that the general public is ready to buy their first robot. The question is: when the Microduck arrives on your desk, what will you teach it to do?

Sources: TechCrunch, CNBC, NVIDIA Blog

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