Nvidia is sending GPUs to the moon

Nvidia’s efforts to widely deploy its GPUs are aiming for a new target: the moon.

Lunar outpostA startup that specializes in building robots for space infrastructure announced Thursday that its upcoming lunar rover will use Jetson chips to control its lidar system. When that happens, it will likely be the first graphics processing unit (GPU) on the moon.

“We’re taking the NVIDIA Jetson and comparing it to our own aviation computing platform that has a little more heritage in spaceflight,” said Justin Cyrus, CEO of Lunar Outpost. “(We’re) seeing what the positives are, we’re seeing what the negatives are. And we’re really pushing toward 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 by 2028. The space agency’s program, modeled on its work with SpaceX, asks technology companies to develop vehicles carrying scientific sensors to the moon to understand its topography and search for materials like water that could be useful or even profitable to exploit.

Nvidia also recently Announce A partnership with Firefly Aerospace, the first private company to safely land a robot on the moon, which will see the Jetson platform operated on a satellite orbiting the moon for image processing. This satellite aims to collect data for scientists trying to map the moon, as well as to track the growing number of robots on the surface.

The next Lunar Outpost rover will be placed on a lander built by Intuitive Machines, another Moon-focused technology company. The vehicle is designed to carry an array of sensors to craters and other places that are difficult to explore from orbit. The next mission will be to explore a place on the moon called Reiner Gamma, where scientists have been puzzled by a magnetic anomaly.

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

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

“Our autonomous group was a little more deterministic five years ago, and now it’s a mix of deterministic and physical AI, which is very interesting,” Cyrus said. “We’re still running both in parallel, and so our job is to figure out where physical AI can actually plug into our stack and help us do things that no one has done before.”

Using GPUs in space is difficult due to the harsh environment. Most space GPUs are located in near-Earth orbit, where they are relatively protected from radiation and large temperature changes. The Moon is more directly exposed to cosmic radiation and fluctuates in temperature as it passes through its phases.

“Your system has to survive the lunar night, and it has to do so using very low power,” Cyrus said.

If they can get the chips to work in that environment, Lunar Outpost engineers hope their vehicles will be more capable — able to process their environment and make decisions more quickly. NASA has broad ambitions for a sustainable human presence on the Moon, but that will likely require autonomous systems to pave the way and do the heavy lifting.

“What we’re currently working on at Lunar Outpost is how do we move from exploration to permanence, and how do we build this outpost on the moon?” Cyrus said. “We’re thinking about combining our deterministic models as well as a physical AI layer — that’s what allows us to make human presence in space sustainable, with that robotic workforce already in place.”

In the next few years, Lunar Outpost will have several small, autonomous rovers scheduled for launch to the Moon, and a larger one, Pegasus, intended to carry astronauts. Pegasus is waiting for a rocket built by Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, to carry it to the moon, but that launch vehicle suffered a malfunction this summer and it’s unclear when it will return to flight.

“They seem to be making very good progress on the podium,” Cyrus said. “I can’t really answer Blue Origin’s timelines or NASA’s timelines on rebuilding the platform, but everything we’ve been told, we’re on the same timeline (for 2028).”

This leaves future visions Satellite data centers And fleets of robots working on the moon are waiting for the same thing: a bigger rocket.