Nvidia’s (NVDA) juggernaut Blackwell chip business, of course, gets all the headlines. But flying under the radar is Nvidia's auto business, which is beginning to make some waves. And it’s just getting started.

Case in point: "Fourth-quarter Automotive revenue was $570 million, up 27% from the previous quarter and up 103% from a year ago. Full-year revenue rose 55% to $1.7 billion," Nvidia revealed in its latest earnings release on Wednesday night.

“Nvidia's automotive vertical revenue is expected to grow to approximately $5 billion this fiscal year,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said on the earnings conference call.

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Nvidia’s foray into the automotive sector is nothing new, but the drumbeat of news coming from the business has picked up recently.

Take CES last month, for example, where the company highlighted the business.

"In order to build a self-driving car, you need to train a mountain of data, video data," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with Yahoo Finance from CES, explaining that Nvidia's graphics chips can be used not just for video games, but for simulations to train autonomous vehicles.

"If just right now where the self-driving car business is, if it's already a $5 billion business for us, imagine how big it's going to be when we have a hundred million new cars per year. A trillion miles driven per year. This is likely going to be one of the largest robotics industries in the world and one of the largest computing industries in the world," Huang said.

The company made a slew of news this quarter and at CES on the automotive front. 

Nvidia announced that Toyota (TM) — the world’s largest automaker — will begin using the company’s DRIVE AGX Orin chip and the Nvidia DriveOS operating system to power advanced driver assistance features in its next-generation vehicles.

Nvidia said German tire and auto supplier Continental and self-driving truck company Aurora (AUR) would also use Nvidia’s DRIVE hardware and DriveOS software in Aurora’s level 4 autonomous driving system, Aurora Driver. Continental and Aurora plan to bring autonomous trucks hauling freight to roads beginning in 2027.

And Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group announced it would use Nvidia technologies to accelerate AV and robotics development, as well as smart factory initiatives.

And those are just new updates. Nvidia chips are already used to power self-driving technologies at Mercedes (MGBAF), Volvo (VOLCAR-B.ST), China's BYD (BYDDY), and device maker Foxconn, for example, and Nvidia chips power some of Tesla’s supercomputers too.

The confluence of supercomputing and robotics (like cars, for example) is one of the next big frontiers for AI. Huang calls it physical AI, or embodied AI, where physical objects harness AI to interact with the real world.

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“More than any other factor, the growing investor interest in embodied AI has been driven by recent advancements in genAI/supercomputing,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a research note in late January.

Advancements in AI — whether inspired by OpenAI, DeepSeek, or others — will help the millions of vehicles around the globe that are using self-driving software, and likely powered by Nvidia’s Drive OS and hardware.

While the future of autonomous and other physical AI will be exciting from a tech capabilities standpoint, it could also be lucrative for investors.

"The [autonomous vehicle] revolution has arrived," Huang said during his CES keynote. "I predict that this will likely be the first multitrillion-dollar robotics industry."

Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram.

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