The metaverse-industrial complex

This paper explores the role that Nvidia is playing in shaping the Metaverse for industrial applications in simulation and automation. As the world's largest manufacturer of Graphics Processing Units for computationally intensive tasks and one of the largest corporations by market capitalization, Nvidia has remained relatively overlooked within critical discussions of ‘Big Tech', the Metaverse, and Artificial Intelligence. This paper draws on news media reports and publicly accessible Nvidia publications such as developer documentation and press releases to understand the role of Nvidia in shaping the Metaverse for industrial enterprises. It conceptualises the ‘Metaverse-Industrial Complex' to theorise the processes of market capture, territorialization, and platform expansionism occurring within the convergence of the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence that is reconfiguring the governance of public and private assets and infrastructure. Through an examination of Nvidia's ‘Omniverse' platform and network of industrial partnerships, the paper examines the Metaverse-Industrial Complex as an assemblage of developer tools, platforms, data standards, and industry partnerships that converge machine learning and 3D graphics into photo-realistic ‘digital twin’ simulations of physical objects and environments.