Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that in addition to artificial intelligence, robotics is the chipmaker's most promising market for growth, and self-driving cars will be the first major commercial application of the technology.

"There are many growth opportunities for our company, of which AI and robotics are the two largest, representing trillions of dollars of growth opportunities," Jensen Huang said in response to a question from an attendee at Nvidia's annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday.

More than a year ago, Nvidia adjusted the way its business units report financial reports, combining the automotive and robotics units into the same project. In May of this year, Nvidia said that the business unit had quarterly sales of $567 million, accounting for about 1% of the company's total revenue. The automotive and robotics businesses grew 72% year-on-year.

Over the past three years, the company's sales have surged due to continued strong demand for Nvidia's data center graphics processing units (GPUs). These GPUs are used to build and run complex AI applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Nvidia’s total sales have surged from about $27 billion in fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion last year, and analysts expect sales to approach $200 billion this year, according to LSEG.

Nvidia shares climbed to a record high on Wednesday, with a market value of $3.75 trillion, just ahead of Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company.

While robotics is still relatively small for Nvidia right now, Huang said applications will require the company’s data center AI chips to train software, as well as other chips installed in self-driving cars and robots.

Huang highlighted Nvidia’s Thrive platform for self-driving cars, which includes chips and software, and is being used by Mercedes-Benz. He also mentioned the company’s recent release of Cosmos, an AI model for humanoid robots.

“We are working toward a day when billions of robots, hundreds of millions of self-driving cars, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories will be powered by Nvidia technology,” Huang said.

Nvidia is increasingly offering more complementary technologies, including software, cloud services and network chips for connecting AI accelerators, while providing AI chips. Jensen Huang said Nvidia's brand is evolving and is more appropriately described as an "AI infrastructure" or "computing platform" provider.

"We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company a long time ago," Jensen Huang said.

At the annual general meeting, shareholders approved the company's executive pay plan and re-elected all 13 board members. Proposals from outside shareholders to produce more detailed diversity reports and change shareholder meeting procedures were not passed.