Jensen Huang closed Monday's GTC 2026 keynote in San Jose with an unusual guest: Olaf, the snowman from Disney's Frozen, walked onstage unassisted to meet him. The robot — built by Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development — is the most sophisticated free-roaming character Disney has ever produced, and it's heading to theme parks in two weeks.

How Olaf Learned to Walk

The robot runs on Nvidia GPUs and was trained using the Newton Physics Engine, an open-source tool co-developed by Nvidia, Google DeepMind, and Disney Research. Training happens inside Kamino, Disney's GPU-accelerated physics simulator, which runs thousands of parallel robot environments on a single chip simultaneously.

Rather than hand-animating every movement, Olaf was placed in a full 3D simulation of its own body — every motor, wire, and bolt — and left to learn through reinforcement learning, the same technique behind Disney's BD-X droids in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge. Critically, the training data came from the actual Frozen film animators, so Olaf didn't just learn to walk — he learned to walk with his signature snowman shuffle.

Olaf's voice was recorded by Josh Gad in a studio session, and the character has a growing library of lines to draw from. At the GTC appearance, an operator selected responses in real time.

Parks Debut

Olaf is set to make his public debut on March 29 as part of Celebration in Arendelle, a daily boat show at the World of Frozen area opening in Disney Adventure World at Disneyland Paris. A Hong Kong Disneyland appearance is also planned.

"Technology finally caught up," said Josh Gorin, VP of R&D at Imagineering. "We had our sights set on creating a real-life Olaf for a long time."