Nvidia’s efforts to deploy its GPUs throughout the world point to a new goal: the Moon.

Lunar Outpost, a startup that builds robotics for space infrastructure, announced Thursday that its lunar rover will use Jetson chips to control its LiDAR system. When it does, it will likely be the first GPU on the lunar surface.

“We’re taking NVIDIA Jetson and comparing it to our flight computing platform that has a little more spaceflight heritage,” said Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus. “[We’re] seeing what the advantages are, seeing what the disadvantages are. And we’re really working on trying to adopt these more capable GPU-driven systems in these extreme environments.”

NASA has launched a campaign to pay private companies to explore the lunar surface ahead of plans to return human astronauts, perhaps as early as 2028. The space agency’s program, inspired by its work with SpaceX, calls on technology companies to develop vehicles that carry scientific sensors to the Moon to understand its terrain and search for substances such as water that could prove useful or even lucrative to exploit.

Nvidia also recently announced a partnership with Firefly Aerospace, the first private company to safely land a robot on the Moon, that will see the Jetson platform operate on a satellite orbiting the Moon to process images. That satellite aims to collect data for scientists trying to map the Moon, but also track the growing number of robots on the surface.

The next Lunar Outpost rover is packaged aboard a lander built by Intuitive Machines, another Moon-focused technology company. The rover is designed to transport a sensor package to craters and other places difficult to explore from orbit. The next mission will explore a place on the lunar surface called Reiner Gamma, where a magnetic anomaly has baffled scientists.

Each mission is expected to lift off on a Falcon 9 rocket before the end of the year.

Nvidia’s Jetson platform is not as well-known as AI workhorses like Blackwell and Vera Rubin, but it is a vital part of many physical AI systems. Designed to be compact and energy efficient, Jetson allows robotic systems to process sensor inputs locally, allowing them to understand and react to the world around them more quickly.

“Our autonomy stack was a little more deterministic five years ago, and now it’s a combination of physical and deterministic AI, which is pretty fun,” Cyrus said. “We still run both in parallel, and then it’s our job to figure out where physical AI can plug into our stack and help us do things no one has done before.”

Using GPUs in space is challenging due to the extreme environment. Most GPUs for space travel are in orbit near Earth, where they are relatively protected from radiation and dramatic temperature changes. The Moon is more directly exposed to cosmic radiation and temperature changes as it goes through its phases.

“Their system has to survive the lunar night and it has to do so at very low power,” Cyrus said.

If they can operate the chips in that environment, Lunar Outpost engineers hope their vehicles will be more capable, able to more quickly process their environment and make decisions. NASA has big ambitions for a sustained human presence on the Moon, but that will likely require autonomous systems to pave the way and do the heavy lifting.

“What we’re currently working on at Lunar Outpost is how to move from exploration to permanence, how do we actually build that outpost on the moon?” Cyrus said. “We believe that combining our deterministic models plus the physical layer of AI is what allows us to make the human presence in space sustainable, actually having that robotic workforce.”

In the coming years, Lunar Outpost is scheduled to launch several smaller autonomous vehicles to the Moon, and a larger one, Pegasus, which is intended to transport astronauts. Pegasus is waiting for a rocket built by Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, to take it to the Moon, but that launch vehicle suffered an anomaly this summer and it’s unclear when it will fly again.

“It seems like they’re making pretty good progress on the platform,” Cyrus said. “I can’t really respond to Blue Origin’s timelines or NASA’s timelines on rebuilding the pad, but all they’ve told us is that we’re on the same timeline. [for 2028].”

That leaves futuristic visions of space data centers and fleets of robots working on the Moon waiting for the same thing: a bigger rocket.