Caterpillar partners with Nvidia to bring AI to construction sites

Caterpillar is partnering with Nvidia to incorporate AI and automation into its construction machinery. As part of this partnership, the company is piloting an AI assistive system called Cat AI Assistant in its mid-size Cat 306 CR Mini Excavator. The system, which was demoed at CES on Wednesday, is built using Nvidia’s Jetson Thor physical AI platform.

The Cat AI Assistant is built on a fleet of AI agents. It is designed to help machine operators by answering questions, providing access to resources, offering safety tips, and scheduling services. Brandon Hootman, vice president of data and AI at Caterpillar, explained that operators need to obtain insights and take necessary actions while actively working. “Our customers don’t live in front of a laptop day in and day out; they live in the dirt,” Hootman said. He noted that Caterpillar started with this project because it addressed an immediate customer challenge where they had momentum, while also establishing a technological foundation for future development.

Beyond the operator assistant, Caterpillar is piloting digital twins of construction sites using Nvidia’s Omniverse library of simulation resources. These digital twins are virtual simulations designed to help test scheduling scenarios and calculate required building materials. To power these simulations, Caterpillar relies on data from its active fleet; its machines send roughly 2,000 messages back to the company every second.

The collaboration fits directly into Nvidia’s broader strategy for physical AI, which refers to AI models deployed into robots or physical machines. Bill Dally, Nvidia’s chief scientist, spoke to TechCrunch in 2025, stating that the chipmaker considers physical AI to be the next frontier for the company and its GPUs. During its CES keynote on Monday, Nvidia detailed its ecosystem for physical AI, which includes its Cosmos open AI model family, simulation tools, and developer kits. Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at Nvidia, described physical AI as the next wave of the technology. Talla stated that Nvidia is pioneering this space by providing computers to train, simulate, and deploy models into physical machines, ranging from autonomous cars to Caterpillar equipment.

Why it matters

This partnership highlights how Nvidia is successfully extending its AI ecosystem beyond data centers and into legacy industries, validating its physical AI strategy with real-world, non-tech applications.