Preorders for the Microduck robot have passed 20,000 units, Hugging Face's Clem Delangue said in a tweet, after a video of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang playing with a flock of the waddling devices at the company's GTC Berlin conference spread widely online this week. The robots respond to voice commands by sitting, standing, lying down for a nap and performing somersaults, and they make small R2-D2-like noises as they move. Delangue said he believes the Microduck could end up the year's best-selling robot, and possibly not only among children, since promotional videos also show adults using them. The units are expected to be delivered in time for Christmas, putting them in position to become the holiday season's hottest toy.
Microducks are open source devices made by Pollen Robotics, the company Hugging Face acquired in 2025. Hugging Face itself was purchased by Nvidia in September, so Pollen Robotics now sits under the GPU maker. The Microduck is Hugging Face's second robot, following the Reachy Mini. The product's rise comes as Nvidia, a US chip company, extends its reach from data center hardware into consumer robotics.
The robots were trained with Nvidia's technology stack. Simulations of the Microducks were used to teach them basic tricks such as walking, sitting and standing, and those tricks ship with the devices. Pollen Robotics says owners can train their robots with new tricks and then share those tricks with the community.
The viral moment arrived during a week in which AI involvement was blamed for cyberattack after cyberattack, giving the AI industry what the source article described as a black eye. Against that backdrop, the Microduck video circulated as a lighter story about a US technology company's consumer product.
The attention around the Microduck follows other recent robotics and AI industry developments, including Warhound raising $200 million to engineer war dogs equipped with Anduril gear, Tesla beginning Optimus robot production in California as its profit fell 43 percent, and the year-old AI lab Flapping Airplanes raising $1 billion at a $6 billion valuation.
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