Nvidia on Wednesday released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, a free, open-weight model that transcribes audio in up to 40 languages. It also launched version 2 of Granary, its open-source speech dataset. Nvidia says the model translates 31 languages to and from English, handles recordings up to an hour long, and tells up to eight speakers apart. It claims the model beats rivals on benchmarks, including Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard. The tools target developers building apps for business meetings and medical transcription. They can tune apps to an industry's jargon in each language. The model works only with recorded audio, not live streams. At 30 billion parameters, Transcribe can run on a single chip, Nvidia says. The release follows Mistral's Voxtral 3, ElevenLabs' Realtime, and Salesforce's Launa-Omni.

Otto Group and Sereact are deploying up to 25 NVIDIA-powered, AI-controlled robots in a logistics centre to handle returned items, a labour-intensive task. The robots run on Sereact's Cortex Physical AI and can process items without specific prior training. NVIDIA's systems helped with simulation and testing. Otto Group will deploy the system in two phases to judge whether it can work at large scale. NVIDIA last closed at $217.94, up 0.9%. Advanced Micro Devices rose 5.5% to $560.26 after announcing a partnership with Meta Platforms on AI infrastructure. Broadcom gained 4% to $342.33, and Micron Technology rose 2.8% to $928.76.

In 1997, with Nvidia weeks from insolvency, chief executive officer Jensen Huang ordered mass production of the RIVA 128, a graphics chip that existed only in a simulator. He told the Acquired podcast the company had "about six months of cash left." Taping out, the step of sending a design to a factory, is a point of no return. Huang spent about half the company's remaining cash on an emulator to test the design virtually, then skipped prototyping and went straight to TSMC. Nvidia cut staff from about 100 to 40 and survived on a $5 million investment from Sega. The RIVA 128 sold roughly a million units in its first four months, paving the way for the 1999 IPO. Nvidia is now worth about $5.3 trillion.