Caterpillar hires Nvidia to bring AI to its construction equipment

Caterpillar is diving deep into integrating AI and automation into its construction machinery group through a partnership with semiconductor giant Nvidia.

The construction equipment giant is testing an AI-assisted system in its mid-range Cat 306 CR Mini Excavator. Dubbed “Cat AI,” the system was built using Nvidia’s Jetson Thor AI platform, and it’s being released at CES on Wednesday.

Brandon Hootman, vice president of data and AI at Caterpillar, told TechCrunch that Cat AI is built on a set of AI assistants and can help answer machine operator questions, allow them to access resources, provide safety instructions, and system services.

One of the biggest benefits of bringing technology into these systems is what these systems collect and send back.

“Our customers don’t sit in front of a laptop every day; they live in dust,” Hootman said. “Being able to recognize and act on what they need while working is very important to them.”

Caterpillar is also testing digital twins of construction sites using Nvidia’s Omniverse library of simulation tools to test scenarios and calculate how much construction equipment a project might need. Hootman said the Caterpillar machine sends about 2,000 messages to the company every second. This data will help them make these estimates.

The company already has autonomous vehicles in the the mining sectorand Hootman said that these pilot programs are a good next step as the company looks to bring more automation to its operations.

“The reason we started here was a big problem for our customers today that needed to be solved, and something that we took action on and saw if we could bring to market quickly,” Hootman said. “What we also liked was that it gave us a technical foundation to build on.”

Working with companies like Caterpillar — a legacy brand not often associated with tech companies — seems to fit Nvidia’s approach to physical AI.

Bill Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist, told TechCrunch in 2025 that The chip maker sees physical AI as the next frontier for the company and its powerful GPUs.

At its big CES keynote on Monday, Nvidia laid out its plans A complete physical AI ecosystemwhich includes open source AI models such as those of the industry Cosmos model familymeasurement tools, and programming tools.

While some may think that physical AI is for the robotics industry, Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at Nvidia, told TechCrunch the company takes on more meaning as everyone is building robotics today.

“Physical AI is the next phase of AI,” Talla said. “Nvidia is pioneering the fact that they have computers that train those models, that try to test models and put them into robots, whether (it’s) an autonomous car or a Caterpillar machine.”

Follow along with all of TechCrunch CES study here.