Technology

Jensen Huang pleased the crowd at the CES conference this week — just not the “right” crowd. The Nvidia co-founder and chief executive was in rare form for the annual conference’s keynote address, even swapping his typical black leather racing jacket for a glittery one. He used the occasion to introduce products such as new videogaming processors and even an artificial-intelligence supercomputer the size of a large sandwich. He also announced new efforts in humanoid robots and self-driving cars, the latter of which he predicted will be the “first trillion-dollar robotics industry.” The in-person audience was thrilled — particularly with a new family of gaming graphics cards based on the company’s Blackwell AI chip. But investors seemed disappointed, sending Nvidia’s stock sliding more than 6% Tuesday. That was double what the shares gained the previous day, when Nvidia seemed on track to surpass Apple and perhaps become the first public

Nvidia stock was climbing ahead of Wednesday’s opening bell, recovering some ground after stronger-than-expected economic data triggered a Big Tech selloff. Shares in the chip designer rose 1.9% to $140.14 in premarket trading. Futures tracking the benchmark S&P 500 index were up 0.3%. Nvidia stock tumbled 6.2% in the previous session, wiping out about $200 billion worth of market capitalization. The plunge came shortly after red-hot jobs numbers fueled investors’ fears that the Federal Reserve won’t cut interest rates by much this year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said November job openings rose to 8.1 million, which was ahead of economists’ expectations at 7.7 million, according to FactSet. When the labor market is strong, there’s less incentive for the Fed to cut rates — and higher borrowing costs tend to particularly weigh on tech stocks by chipping away at the future cash flows that make up a core part of

IonQ and other quantum-computing stocks slid after Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang played down the likely utility of the technology in the near- or medium-term. “If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that’d probably be on the early side. If you said 30 is probably on the late side,” Huang told analysts late Tuesday. Quantum-computing shares, which have surged since Alphabet announced a technological breakthrough last month, tumbled in premarket trading. Shares of IonQ (IONQ), Quantum Computing (QUBT), D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) and Rigetti Computing (RGTI) all fell 14% or more. Huang said that quantum computing was good at small data problems, such as cryptography, rather than large data problems.

Nvidia stock was rising on Tuesday as investors reacted to developments around new products from the chip designer. Shares climbed 1.3% to $151.40 in premarket trading. Futures tracking the benchmark S&P 500 were up 0.1%. Nvidia had risen 3.4% on Monday, briefing topping Apple’s market valuation in intraday trading. The chip designer closed at a market capitalization at $3.66 trillion, putting it on the brink of overtaking the iPhone maker as the world’s most-valuable company. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave a keynote speech at the CES tech trade show in Las Vegas on Monday, unveiling the company’s next-generation gaming graphics cards. But that’s not moving the stock in a major way, given that it’s artificial intelligence rather than gaming that has led to shares skyrocketing over the past two years.

Aurora Innovation stock was surging Tuesday morning after the self-driving technology company revealed its partnership with Nvidia to deploy driverless trucks. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang announced the long-term manufacturing deal with Aurora and Continental, Aurora’s manufacturing partner, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Nvidia DRIVE Thor, an in-vehicle computing platform, will be used in the primary computer of the Aurora Driver, the press release states. Pittsburgh-based Aurora plans to launch its driverless trucks commercially in April 2025, a timeline that has already been delayed from the previous plans to push it out in 2024. CEO Chris Urmson told investors in October that he’s taking a “crawl, walk, run approach” with the trucks, planning to deploy just 10 at the start. The shift in the timeline is expected to have “negligible financial impact,” Urmson had said. Aurora’s stock was up 65% at one point during premarket trading, before

Nvidia (NVDA) remains a leader in artificial intelligence across hardware and software and is expanding its influence beyond cloud services to enterprise and consumer markets, BofA Securities said in a note Tuesday. The company’s Blackwell accelerators are now in full production and support over 200 configurations across major service providers positioning it to meet growing AI demands, according to the note. BofA said the new Cosmos platform has streamlined faster development of physical AI targeting industries like autonomous vehicles and robotics. “Nvidia’s Llama Nemotron and Cosmos Nemotron now offer tools for AI agents capable of language and video/image perception abilities, applied to various real-life applications,” the firm said. BofA has a buy rating on Nvidia’s stock with a price objective of $190.