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

Jensen Huang’s cameo with a flock of waddling Microducks did more than fill a keynote clip. The little robots, which stomp, fall over for a “nap,” and flip on voice command, went viral during Nvidia’s GTC Berlin conference earlier this week, and by the next day preorder demand had already passed 20,000 units, according to Hugging Face’s Clem Delangue.

That kind of response is the sort of thing hardware teams dream about and investors pretend they predicted all along. The Microducks are expected to ship in time for Christmas, which puts them squarely in holiday-toy territory, even if Delangue is thinking bigger than that and suggests they could end up as the year’s best-selling robot. The promo videos show adults playing with them, too.

The bots come from Pollen Robotics, the open-source robotics company Hugging Face acquired in 2025. The source also says Hugging Face is now an Nvidia company, after the GPU giant bought it in September. This is Hugging Face’s second robot after Reachy Mini, and the Microducks were trained using Nvidia’s stack.

That training included simulated versions learning basic tricks like walking, sitting and standing before they shipped. Pollen says owners can teach the robots new tricks and share them with the community. So yes, the same week the AI industry was taking hits over cyberattack fears, a tiny open robot with a duck face became the thing everyone wanted to order.