Nvidia's Midas touch provides a boon to partners
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Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios
Call it Nvidia's Midas touch: whatever the company touches tends to turn into gold.
Why it matters: Nvidia is an increasingly powerful force driving the AI economy with a market cap of well over $3 trillion.
The latest: Shares in Aurora, a self-driving tech company, surged 29% Tuesday on news of a long-term strategic partnership with AI's premier chipmaker to fuel its plan to put driverless trucks on the road.
Zoom out: Aurora was just one company to benefit from Nvidia's halo effect. In a keynote speech late Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show — and in related announcements — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang outlined a slew of new partners on robotics and autonomous vehicles, including:
- Uber on self-driving car data.
- Toyota on autonomous vehicle hardware and software.
- Accenture on advanced warehouses.
What they're saying: "Nvidia continues to expand its well-optimized and targeted lineup of AI services for enterprise customers," Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya writes in a research note.
The impact: All three stocks mentioned above popped Tuesday morning, but shed gains as the day wore on in a broad-based stock selloff.
- Nvidia itself fell 6.2% Tuesday after hitting an all-time high in morning following a surge to start the year.
What to watch: Whether Nvidia crosses the $4 trillion market cap threshold in 2025.
- "We believe the robotics and autonomous technology market alone represents another $1 trillion of incremental market opportunity that Nvidia now can tap into over the coming years," according to Nvidia bull and Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.
The bottom line: For others, getting access to Nvidia's chips, let alone a namecheck from Huang himself, continues to be a mark of credibility in the ever-growing AI market.
