Hottest toy for Christmas? Nvidia CEO plays with adorable Microduck robots, 20,000 sell

At Nvidia's GTC Berlin keynote, Jensen Huang played on stage with a group of small Microduck robots that walked, sat, flopped over for a nap and did somersaults on voice command. The clip spread fast. By the next day, Hugging Face's Clem Delangue said preorders had passed 20,000 units, with delivery expected in time for Christmas.

The Microduck comes from Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face acquired in 2025. Nvidia bought Hugging Face in September, so this cute little robot is now part of the Nvidia family. It's Hugging Face's second robot, following Reachy Mini.

We'll admit it: this one made us smile, and in a week when AI was getting blamed for one cyberattack after another, that counts for something. But there's more going on here than a viral video.

The Microduck is open source, it was trained in simulation on Nvidia's stack to learn its basic moves, and Pollen says owners can teach it new tricks and share them with everyone else. That is a sensible way to bring robots into homes. Start small, cheap-feeling and harmless, give hobbyists something to tinker with, and let a community build the behavior library. Personal computers grew up the same way, through enthusiasts before anyone else.

It also tells us something about Nvidia's strategy. The company sells the chips and simulation tools that train robots. Owning Hugging Face, and through it a consumer robot with a ready-made fan base, puts Nvidia at both ends of the chain: the software that teaches machines to move, and a device people actually want on the coffee table. Twenty thousand preorders is small next to the toy business, but it's a real number for a robot, and it's an audience of early adopters who will train and share behaviors in ways the company could never script itself.

We'd keep a couple of things in view. Preorders aren't deliveries, and holiday hardware deadlines have a way of slipping. A shared library of tricks is only as good as its moderation; open communities are wonderful until someone shares something broken or unsafe. And a voice-commanded robot in a living room is a microphone in a living room. We'd want to know what it hears, what it keeps, and where that goes, especially now that it sits inside one of the most powerful companies in AI.

Our read: charming, smart, and probably a preview. If home robots go mainstream, we suspect they'll arrive this way, as toys first and tools later.

Promotional videos show adults playing with the Microducks too, and Delangue has suggested they could become the best-selling robot of the year, not necessarily just for kids. Hugging Face's earlier robot, Reachy Mini, was also pitched as a small, approachable open-source device.