THG News · AI & Research

NVIDIA Previews Isaac GR00T N2 and Opens GR00T N1.7 Early Access at GTC 2026

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NVIDIA previewed Isaac GR00T N2, the next generation of its robot foundation model, at its GTC conference on March 16, 2026, according to an NVIDIA press release. The company said the model is slated to be available by the end of the year. As of early October 2026, NVIDIA's public Isaac GR00T repository on GitHub lists GR00T N1.7 as the current release and does not include N2.

What NVIDIA said about GR00T N2

According to NVIDIA, CEO Jensen Huang presented GR00T N2 as a model based on the company's DreamZero research and built on a new world action model architecture. NVIDIA said the model helps robots succeed at new tasks in new environments more than twice as often as leading vision-language-action (VLA) models, and that it ranked first on the MolmoSpaces and RoboArena evaluations for generalist robot policies at the time of the announcement. NVIDIA has not published pricing for GR00T N2.

GR00T N1.7 and the rest of the stack

The GR00T version available to developers now is N1.7. NVIDIA said at GTC that it was available in early access with commercial licensing, and a separate NVIDIA release described it as an open reasoning VLA built for humanoids. The README in NVIDIA's GitHub repository now describes N1.7 as generally available with a new vision-language backbone. Its predecessor, GR00T N1.6, was announced at CES on January 5, 2026, according to NVIDIA.

NVIDIA paired the model news with simulation and data tools. According to the company, the GTC announcements included:

Who is adopting it

NVIDIA said AGIBOT, Humanoid, LG Electronics, NEURA Robotics and Noble Machines are adopting GR00T N models to speed industrial humanoid deployments. The company also listed 1X, Agility, Agile Robots, Boston Dynamics, Figure, Hexagon Robotics and Mentee among humanoid developers using its Cosmos world models, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab to develop and validate their robots.

Huang framed the push in broad terms at GTC. "Physical AI has arrived," he said in NVIDIA's GTC release, adding that every industrial company will become a robotics company. For buyers and integrators, the practical takeaway is timing: N1.7 is the version available today, and NVIDIA has said only that N2 is slated to be available by the end of 2026.

Sources