Nvidia CEO's GTC Berlin keynote sends Microduck robot preorders past 20,000

A keynote moment that turned into a sales spike

A clip of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang playing with a flock of Microduck robots during his keynote at GTC Berlin spread widely this week, and the commercial response followed almost immediately. According to TechCrunch, preorders for the small robots surpassed 20,000 units by the day after the demonstration, a figure shared by Hugging Face's Clem Delangue in a tweet.

The robots, described by TechCrunch as waddling devices that make small R2-D2-like noises, performed a series of tricks on stage: they stomped their feet, sat, somersaulted on voice command and flopped over for a staged "nap." Deliveries are expected in time for Christmas, and TechCrunch suggests the devices may already be on their way to becoming the hottest toy of the holiday season. Delangue believes they could end up as the best-selling robot of the year, and not necessarily one bought for children, since promotional videos show adults playing with them too.

An open-source robot with a complicated owner

The Microduck is an open-source device built by Pollen Robotics, TechCrunch reports. Its corporate lineage has shifted quickly: Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics in 2025, and Nvidia then bought Hugging Face in September, placing Pollen under the Nvidia umbrella.

The Microduck is Hugging Face's second robot, following the Reachy Mini.

Trained in simulation, extendable by owners

According to TechCrunch, the robots were trained using Nvidia's technology stack. Simulations taught them a set of basic behaviors, including walking, sitting and standing, that come preloaded on every unit. Pollen says owners can go further than the factory settings: the robots can be trained to learn new tricks, and those tricks can then be shared with the wider community of owners.

That combination of pre-trained behaviors and community-shared skills makes the Microduck less like a conventional toy and more like a small programmable platform that happens to arrive in an appealingly cute shell.

Why it matters

The episode is a striking illustration of how quickly consumer hardware can move on the strength of a single demo, but the more interesting detail is what sits underneath. The Microduck was trained in simulation on Nvidia's stack, by a robotics company Nvidia now owns outright through its Hugging Face acquisition. Huang's keynote moment was, in effect, a showcase of a vertically integrated pipeline spanning silicon, simulation, training and now the robot itself.

The timing also gave the story an unusual tone. TechCrunch framed the viral clip as a welcome palate cleanser in a week when AI was blamed for a string of cyberattacks. A duck-shaped robot that plays dead on command does not change the industry's more serious problems, but 20,000 preorders in roughly a day is a meaningful signal that the same underlying technology can also produce consumer products people actively want in their homes.