The robot duck Jensen Huang played with onstage is selling so fast it won't make Christmas

Pollen Robotics, the Hugging Face robotics team behind the $399 Microduck, now tells shoppers on its official store that it "can't promise Christmas delivery" for new orders and estimates four to six months to ship, days after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang demoed the robots onstage and Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said preorders were crossing 20,000.

A $399 open-source robot that learns to walk in simulation is exactly the kind of thing that used to live in research labs, and now it's a backordered stocking stuffer, thanks in part to Jensen Huang playing with it on a keynote stage. That's the real signal: Nvidia's physical-AI pitch works better with a duck than a slide deck. The skeptic's note: 20,000 is a CEO's tweet, not a shipping manifest, and "4–6 months" for a small hardware team ramping production is an estimate, not a promise. Early buyers get ducks; everyone else gets an IOU and a lesson in supply chains.

Pollen Robotics' official store now says it can't promise Christmas delivery for new Microduck orders. The page says the company is ramping up production, that orders ship first ordered, first shipped, and that the current estimate for a new order is four to six months. Those lines are on the store page.

Microduck costs $399 before taxes and shipping. Preorders opened on Aug. 27, 2026. It comes in four colorways: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky. Those lines are Pollen's.

Pollen describes Microduck as a small biped robot, about 25 centimeters tall and under 800 grams, with 15 motors, a camera, a depth sensor, two IMUs, and an articulated beak that can pick up objects. A biped walks on two legs. An IMU, an inertial measurement unit, is a sensor that tracks tilt and turn. Pollen says it can walk, sit, crouch, get back up from many falls, and even roller-skate. It is built for play, for robotics, and for reinforcement learning, the training method where a robot tries a movement and keeps what works. The software for control, simulation, and training is open source, which means the code is public. Those lines are Pollen's, from its introduction of the robot.

At GTC Berlin on Oct. 21, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang demoed four Microducks onstage. Nvidia says they were trained in simulation and evaluated on RTX Spark. Nvidia also published a technical walkthrough of using AI agents, plus Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, its robot simulators, to teach Microduck to walk in simulation and then move that learned walk onto the real robot. Those lines are Nvidia's.

Hugging Face chief executive Clem Delangue said on X that Microduck preorders were crossing 20,000. TechCrunch reported that figure. It is a company figure, not an audited sales count. At $399, 20,000 orders would come to roughly $8 million. That dollar figure is the arithmetic on Delangue's number. It is not a Pollen sales total.

Pollen Robotics is part of Hugging Face. Nvidia agreed in September to acquire Hugging Face, and that deal is still pending regulators.

The picture is four Microduck biped robots in cream, graphite, lavender, and sky. The credit is Pollen Robotics.

In plain terms, the $399 robot duck Jensen Huang played with on a keynote stage is backordered. Pollen's own store says it cannot promise a new Microduck by Christmas, and it estimates four to six months. The 20,000 preorder figure is the Hugging Face chief executive's, carried by TechCrunch, not a shipping receipt.