Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that, other than artificial intelligence, robotics represents the chipmaker’s biggest market for potential growth, and that self-driving cars would be the first major commercial application for the technology.

“We have many growth opportunities across our company, with AI and robotics the two largest, representing a multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity,” Huang said on Wednesday, at Nvidia’s annual shareholders meeting, in response to a question from an attendee.

A little over a year ago, Nvidia changed the way it reported its business units to group both its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. In May, Nvidia said that the business unit had $567 million in quarterly sales, or about 1% of the company’s total revenue. Automotive and robotics was up 72% on an annual basis.

Nvidia’s sales have been surging over the past three years due to unyielding demand for the company’s data center graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used to build and operate sophisticated AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Total sales have soared from about $27 billion in its fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion last year, and analysts are expecting nearly $200 billion in sales this year, according to LSEG.

The stock climbed to a record on Wednesday, lifting Nvidia’s market cap to $3.75 trillion, putting it just ahead of Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.

While robotics remains relatively small for Nvidia at the moment, Huang said that applications will require the company’s data center AI chips to train the software as well as other chips installed in self-driving cars and robots.

Huang highlighted Nvidia’s Thrive platform of chips, and software for self-driving cars, which Mercedes-Benz is using. He also said that the company recently released AI models for humanoid robots called Cosmos.

“We’re working towards a day where there will be billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories that can be powered by Nvidia technology,” Huang said.

Nvidia has increasingly been offering more complementary technology alongside its AI chips, including software, a cloud service, and networking chips to tie AI accelerators together. Huang said Nvidia’s brand is evolving, and that it’s better described as an “AI infrastructure” or “computing platform” provider.

“We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago,” Huang said.

At the annual meeting, shareholders approved the company’s executive compensation plan and reelected all 13 board members. Outside shareholder proposals to produce a more detailed diversity report and change shareholder meeting procedure did not pass.

WATCH: AMD working to catch Nvidia

Republic, a New York-based investment startup, is offering users exposure to SpaceX by issuing a “tokenized” representation of its shares.

The company will begin selling the digital tokens this week and eventually plans to expand the offering to other private companies like artificial intelligence darlings OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Stripe, X, Waymo, Epic Games and more. The Wall Street Journal first reported the story Wednesday.

“We’re talking about delivering products to retail investors that they’ve have been held out of previously,” Republic co-CEO Andrew Durgee told CNBC. “The fact that retail investors couldn’t own pre-IPO SpaceX has always been crazy to us. Now that’s going to be attached to the upside of these pre-IPO businesses. The businesses that we target out of the gate we want to have a retail focus, or at least significant retail following.”

In the crypto world, tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The move comes as the U.S. crypto industry is testing new regulatory boundaries under President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration. Since he took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has moved swiftly to loosen the restraints left on the crypto industry by the previous administration, ending an enforcement case against Coinbase; closing investigations into Robinhood Crypto, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys without enforcement action; scaling back its crypto enforcement unit; declaring meme coins are not securities and launching a Crypto Task Force that’s been holding a series of roundtables on crypto asset regulation.

“If you take a step back and look at what the last four to eight years looked like in the space, innovation was very stifled,” Durgee said. “The reality is the space was just difficult for most to understand and consume. Now we’ve gotten to a point where it’s certainly become more mainstay.”

“We’ve moved from what was ultimately … nothing but headwinds,” he added. “And now we’re finally in a place industrywide, where we actually have tailwinds and we have some room to really innovate.”

Republic will allow investors to invest between $50 and $5,000 in the tokens. Typically, those wanting to invest in private companies are required to meet a minimum closer to $10,000 and need to meet specific income or net-worth requirements. Shares of private company can be exchanged by accredited investors in secondary markets; Republic will initially price SpaceX tokens based on how the company’s shares are performing there.

Tokenized private equity is new territory for regulators and the underlying companies being digitally represented. There are outstanding questions about the legality of the tokens, how Republic will give financial information to investors as required, and how selling private investments to retail investors could provoke stress in the financial markets.

“We don’t need a company’s approval to be able to do these types of offerings, and I do think there will be some companies that will want more control over something like that,” Durgee said. “The reality is the structure that we’re using, which was built on securities law from the 1930s, in a lot of instances allows us the leeway to give these types of offerings. People are going to really have to start to question how they’re going to approach some of these innovations, and how far they will want to push that risk envelope.”

Financial institutions are becoming increasingly interested in tokenizing traditional assets because of the often-touted benefits of blockchain technology: lower costs, faster settlement times, greater transparency about ownership and performance and programmable terms, as well as increased accessibility for retail investors and global reach.

The announcement comes about a week after Coinbase said it’s pushing for SEC approval to offer trading of tokenized public stocks, which would give the crypto services provider an additional revenue stream and put it in closer competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.

Competing crypto exchange Kraken recently said it’ll offer tokens of U.S. stocks for 24/7 trading in unspecified markets abroad.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has said he sees the “tokenization of every financial asset” as an important step in “the technological revolution in the financial markets.”

AeroVironment stock rocketed more than 24% higher Wednesday as the drone maker beat fourth quarter expectations on the top and bottom lines.

Here’s how the company did compared to analyst expectations:

• Earnings: $1.61 per share adjusted vs $1.39 per share expected
• Revenue: $275 million vs $242 million expected

The company reported financial results after market close Tuesday and logged record fiscal year revenue of $820.6 million, up 14% over the prior period.

AeroVironment reported net income of $16.66 million for the fourth quarter, or 59 cents per share, compared to net income of $6.05 million, or 22 cents per share, last year.

The company closed the $4.1 billion acquisition of defense tech company BlueHalo on May 1. BlueHalo makes drone and defense technology such as laser weapon systems, with a focus on space tech.

“Our acquisition of BlueHalo further advances our leadership position within the defense-technology sector by adding a complementary portfolio of innovative products and capabilities aligned to our customers’ highest priorities,” AeroVironment CEO Wahid Nawabi said in a statement.

For the new fiscal year, the company said it expects revenues to range between $1.9 billion and $2 billion. The company forecast earnings between $2.80 and $3.00 per share.

WATCH: AeroVironment CEO on European defense spending boost, U.S. defense spending and Trump