A $399 robot duck stole Nvidia’s keynote, and preorders passed 20,000 within days
Nvidia’s CEO showed off a $399 duck-shaped robot at a Berlin keynote, and its maker’s co-founder said preorders passed 20,000 within days. Accounts of how smoothly the robots performed on stage conflict, and the count comes from the company itself.
Four robots shaped like ducks walked, sat, flopped into a scripted nap and tried a somersault when Jensen Huang asked for one, at Nvidia’s GTC Berlin keynote on October 21, 2026. The robot is called Microduck: about 25 centimeters tall, under 800 grams, with 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor and two inertial sensors packed inside.
Huang’s keynote credited Nvidia’s simulation tools for training its movements before any of them touched a physical robot.
Pollen Robotics builds it. Pollen is part of Hugging Face, which agreed on September 2, 2026 to sell itself to Nvidia for about $12.9 billion, a deal still awaiting regulatory approval and not expected to close before the first half of 2027. The company staging the keynote demo does not yet own the company that makes the robot.
Microduck has been open for preorder since August 27, 2026, at $399 before tax and shipping. Days after the keynote clip spread online, Hugging Face co-founder Clem Delangue said on social media that preorders had passed 20,000, a number he described as still climbing.
Accounts of the keynote itself do not agree. One report described the ducks completing every cue, walking, sitting, playing dead and the somersault, without incident. Another counted three Microducks falling over on the nap command, a fourth that kept walking before it tipped, and at least one failed somersault.
Pollen is shipping the base unit, plus optional charger, developer and accessory packs, before Christmas 2026 to buyers in North America, Europe and the United Kingdom. No delivery date has been set for other regions.
Delangue posted the 20,000 himself, before the count settled, and no sales ledger outside the company confirms it. The clip that went viral and the one that reportedly stumbled came from the same minute on the same stage, and no one has published which version a December buyer will actually get.
