Nvidia is sending GPUs to the Moon

Nvidia’s effort to deploy its GPUs far and wide is aiming at a new target: the Moon.

Lunar Outpost , a startup building robotics for space infrastructure, announced on Thursday that its next Moon rover will use Jetson chips to control its LiDAR system. When it does, it is likely to be the first GPU on the lunar surface.

“We’re taking the NVIDIA Jetson and comparing it to our flight compute platform that has a little bit more spaceflight heritage,” Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus said. “[We’re] seeing what the pros are, seeing what the cons are. And we’re really pushing towards trying to adopt these more capable GPU-powered systems in these extreme environments.”

NASA has launched a campaign to pay private companies to explore the lunar surface ahead of plans to return human astronauts, perhaps as soon as 2028. The space agency’s program, modeled on its work with SpaceX, asks tech companies to develop vehicles that carry scientific sensors to the Moon to understand its terrain and hunt for substances like water that could prove useful or even lucrative to exploit.

Nvidia also recently announced a partnership with Firefly Aerospace, the first private company to safely land a robot on the Moon, that will see the Jetson platform operate on a satellite orbiting the Moon to process imagery. That satellite aims to collect data for scientists trying to map the Moon, but also to track the growing number of robots on the surface.

Lunar Outpost’s next rover is packaged onboard a lander built by Intuitive Machines, another Moon-focused tech company. The rover is designed to carry a package of sensors into craters and other places that are difficult to explore from orbit. The following mission will be exploring a place on the lunar surface called Reiner Gamma, where a magnetic anomaly has puzzled scientists.

Each mission is expected to take flight on a Falcon 9 rocket before the end of the year.

Nvidia’s Jetson platform isn’t as well known as AI workhorses like Blackwell and Vera Rubin, but it’s a vital part of many physical AI systems. Designed to be compact and power-efficient, Jetson lets robotic systems process sensor inputs locally, allowing them to understand and react to the world around them more quickly.

“Our autonomy stack was a bit more deterministic five years ago, and now it’s a combination of deterministic and physical AI, which is pretty fun,” Cyrus said. “We still run both in parallel, and then it’s our job to figure out where’s physical AI can actually plug into our stack and help us do things that no one’s done before.”