During Nvidia's quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang said that agentic AI has reached "an inflection point" and that AI agents are "solving real problems." 

The company's powerful chips have been at the heart of the AI boom over the last few years, especially for use in data centers -- so much so that Nvidia's annual revenue for fiscal 2026 zoomed to $216 billion, up 65% from the previous year. 

Huang called Nvidia an AI infrastructure company, a dramatic evolution from the graphics card company it started as.

The term agentic AI has been floating around for some time, but now the technology is becoming available for real-world use. Unlike chatbots, which stay within their own boundaries to produce text, images or code, AI agents can take specific actions -- for instance, plan and book a vacation -- without a person constantly giving it commands. 

In a live event just hours before Nvidia released its earnings, Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy S26 lineup of phones, devoting a good deal of time to talking about the "agentic AI experience" they'll deliver. 

During Nvidia's call, Huang said that the world has "awakened to the agentic inflection" and that it only happened within the last two or three months. He also said he believes the next inflection will be physical AI, a term that describes the embedding of artificial intelligence in machinery, including self-driving cars and robots. 

Robots were a notable presence at CES earlier this year, the consumer electronics extravaganza. Companies showed them off doing everything from folding clothes to serving as companions to handling assembly line work. 

We should hear much more about what to expect from Nvidia at its GTC conference in March. It will likely have more to say about its AI-focused Rubin chip, and may also be ready to take the plunge into laptop chip territory.