The Machines that Make the Machines

How we taught robots to assemble GB300 tester trays and what it taught us about robot learning, mechanical intelligence, and good old-fashioned engineering

The NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 superchip is the engine of AI training and inference for modern foundation models. However, the process of assembling GB300 trays requires skilled physical labor in factories across the world. The NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab (SRL), in collaboration with the NVIDIA Isaac engineering team, has asked the central question: Can we build intelligent robots to assemble such complex systems?

The answer is yes, but the path has been challenging. Enabling robots to assemble GB300 trays is one of the hardest problems SRL has tackled in nine years as a highly-prolific research lab. The problem has also challenged our assumptions about where end-to-end learning is most powerful, and where a modular stack might be more effective.

Problems at hand: Moravec returns