Nvidia’s new $250 “Jetson Computer” lets hobbyists play around with AI locally

Nvidia has released a new version of its $249 Jetson PC, designed to run artificial applications locally. The palm-sized Orin Nano is said to double the speed and efficiency of its predecessor at half the price, and can handle roughly 70% more computing tasks, according to Nvidia.

Orin Nano is ideal for hobbyists who want to train their own AI applications, or for developers of robots and other industrial tools to run complex applications without connecting to the cloud.

In short video on YouTube announcing the product, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stands in his kitchen as he pulls a tray out of his oven to reveal the tiny, palm-sized computer. Huang goes on to say that the computer can process almost “seventy trillion” operations per second and draws only 25 watts of power.

“A long time ago, we created a brand new type of processor, it was a robotic processor,” says Huang. “No one understood what we were building at the time, and we imagined that someday these deep learning models would evolve and we would have robots for everything.” Jetpack computers were designed to power robots, but today they can also work with large language models like Meta’s Llama.

Sam Altman’s startup World (formerly Worldcoin), which aims to authenticate human identity through iris scanning, uses Jetpack module inside your Orb scanning device. In a blog post back in October, World said: “In its latest iteration, Orb is equipped with the state-of-the-art NVIDIA Jetson engine with nearly 5x the AI ​​performance of the previous version to enable even faster, more seamless proof of human checks.’

Essentially, the Orin Nano is a portable brain that can be plugged into other hardware to power its AI functionality. Cloud giants like Amazon and Google charge for access to servers and AI models, and those costs can add up. Some applications may need guaranteed uptime and minimal latency, such as warehouse robots. Connecting to a remote cloud hosting provider is not ideal. That being said, a computer like the Orin Nano will only be able to run lighter AI applications—it won’t replace Nvidia’s high-end GPUs, which cost tens of thousands of dollars and are capable of training and inferring large-scale AI models .

Still, if you’re a DIYer looking to build some new AI-powered robot, the Orin Nano might be for you.