Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says robots could be 'AI immigrants' that can address labor shortages — can 'do the type of work that maybe we decided not to do anymore'

Jensen Huang at CES 2026 — (Image credit: Getty Images)

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang referred to AI-controlled robots as "AI immigrants" at a question and answer session with reporters at CES 2026 that Tom's Hardware attended. Huang's comment related to how robotics may do jobs that others do not wish to take on.

Huang started off by saying that "having robots will create jobs," before turning on to discuss a global labor shortage, which he said is tens of millions of people.

"We no longer, as a population, will be able to sustain the economies that we would like to have," Huang said. "And so we need to have more, you know, if you will, AI immigrants to help us on the manufacturing floors and do the type of work that maybe we decided not to do anymore."

The comment didn't cause any gasps or reactions from the crowd of press at the event. Many will think the suggestion that human immigrants do jobs that others don't want to do is already an oversimplification of a complex situation. But it becomes even more complicated when comparing AI robots to the human condition, especially when there is fear about whether humans may have jobs at all.

Huang isn't the first tech leader to say that AI will create jobs. Many have done so with the idea that with agentic copilots, office workers will become far more efficient. He also said that "there are a lot of jobs that won't be replaced by AI for a very long time." But Huang's suggestion that physical, blue-collar labor in manufacturing or other areas could go may scare those who thought their woodworking skills, HVAC certification, or pure grit and determination would keep them working, no matter where they come from.

The CEO also said that he expected to see robots with human-level skills "this year," with work on locomotion, articulation, and fine motor skills.

"We don't just use our eyes, we also use touch," he said. "And the robot only has eyes, so it needs to have touch and so those fine motor skills are hard, hard to develop, but we're developing technology in that area, and I know the rest of the industry is doing so as well."

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Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and BlueSky @andrewfreedman.net. You can send him tips on Signal: andrewfreedman.01

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Jeffrey KampmanSenior Analyst, Graphics
Paul AlcornEditor-in-Chief

10 Comments Comment from the forums

Jagar123

He followed up by saying that the "robotics revolution" will drive the economy forward, and that will allow for more jobs to hire more people.
"We just need the economy to do well," Huang said. "We need inflation to stay low so that, you know, more jobs will be created, living will be more affordable. All of that's going to come with AI."
I don't know what he is thinking but AI has only been good for tech bros, the already rich, and venture capitalists. Regular people are continually seeing higher prices on tech. He seems off his rocker here.
Reply
vanadiel007

I think at this point him, Elon Musk and all the other tech bro's are just saying whatever they think will increase sales, regardless of how far fetched it sounds.

I still have to see the intelligence part of AI. Yes it's very good at finding and summarizing information and performing tasks, but there's still no individual intelligence linked to it.

I just see AI as the next generation search engine.
Reply
JTWrenn

AI is interesting because in many applications it is wonderful. That said, the idea it will create more jobs and that any of these companies are going after it for that is just ridiculous. It's not going to happen. Now we might have fewer low paying jobs and more high paying jobs but that is not going to be 1 to 1. I bet we end up losing 4 or 5 jobs for every job AI creates in the long run. At first the wealth could cause extra start ups but once it gets to the full replacement phase and AGI level of power it's going to go sideways fast.

We need to have taxes for AI that replaces workers. We need to pull nearly all capital expenditure tax write offs and push them to employee write offs. If we don't make human employees cheaper we are going to be in big trouble.
Reply
KennyRedSocks

IA > AI

I love it.
Reply
Hooda Thunkett

The truth is there are a lot of people willing to do a lot of these jobs that "we've decided we don't want to do." It's honestly not that. It's that the people that want the jobs done do not want to pay people to do them. They want slavery back. It's absolutely that simple. There are way more than enough people in the world that would immigrate here to pick fruit and vegetables and clean things for money. But the employer class doesn't want to do that. So, robots.
Reply
bill001g

vanadiel007 said:
I think at this point him, Elon Musk and all the other tech bro's are just saying whatever they think will increase sales, regardless of how far fetched it sounds.

I still have to see the intelligence part of AI. Yes it's very good at finding and summarizing information and performing tasks, but there's still no individual intelligence linked to it.

I just see AI as the next generation search engine.
It is much more than that. It can easily generate computer code and web pages. A huge amount of programming work is typing very repetitive code. AI can remove a lot of boring and tedious part of coding when you need say 100 routines that are extremely similar in function with one or two difference. It still can't be trusted to generate code purely from prompts but it will greatly increase the productivity of a programmer who can just verify the AI code and then do the more complex parts manually.

A lot of this function is now done by entry level programmers with a senior programmer supervising. These are the jobs at risk.....but it does bring up the problem of how do get senior programmers if there are no positions as entry level to begin with.
Reply
SomeoneElse23

bill001g said:
It is much more than that. It can easily generate computer code and web pages. A huge amount of programming work is typing very repetitive code. AI can remove a lot of boring and tedious part of coding when you need say 100 routines that are extremely similar in function with one or two difference. It still can't be trusted to generate code purely from prompts but it will greatly increase the productivity of a programmer who can just verify the AI code and then do the more complex parts manually.

A lot of this function is now done by entry level programmers with a senior programmer supervising. These are the jobs at risk.....but it does bring up the problem of how do get senior programmers if there are no positions as entry level to begin with.
It can easily generate code and web pages ... that are mostly correct.

And usually very inefficient.
Reply
SomeoneElse23

Hooda Thunkett said:
The truth is there are a lot of people willing to do a lot of these jobs that "we've decided we don't want to do." It's honestly not that. It's that the people that want the jobs done do not want to pay people to do them. They want slavery back. It's absolutely that simple. There are way more than enough people in the world that would immigrate here to pick fruit and vegetables and clean things for money. But the employer class doesn't want to do that. So, robots.
There's a clear disconnect in the economy. Employers are willing to pay X to make their ends meet (or stockholders happy) and employees need Y to get ahead and not be slaves.
Reply
vanadiel007

bill001g said:
It is much more than that. It can easily generate computer code and web pages. A huge amount of programming work is typing very repetitive code. AI can remove a lot of boring and tedious part of coding when you need say 100 routines that are extremely similar in function with one or two difference. It still can't be trusted to generate code purely from prompts but it will greatly increase the productivity of a programmer who can just verify the AI code and then do the more complex parts manually.

A lot of this function is now done by entry level programmers with a senior programmer supervising. These are the jobs at risk.....but it does bring up the problem of how do get senior programmers if there are no positions as entry level to begin with.

I think the logical answer to that question would be that you get them from the entry level positions occupied by AI...
Reply
snemarch

bill001g said:
A huge amount of programming work is typing very repetitive code. AI can remove a lot of boring and tedious part of coding when you need say 100 routines that are extremely similar in function with one or two difference.
If you write code like that, you... shouldn't be writing code.

It's insane that the LLM-techbro sociopaths have largely convinced the masses that "being productive" is about churning out large amounts of trivial slop, rather than solving interesting problems or, you know, writing well-architected non-repetitive code.
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