A tiny semiconductor company is more than doubling after becoming an Nvidia supplier
The seal of approval is sending shares of Navitas Semiconductor soaring.
A tiny semiconductor company with fewer than 300 employees is mooning after receiving the biggest blessing any firm in the industry could dream of: earning a place in Nvidia’s supply chain.
“We are proud to be selected by NVIDIA to collaborate on their 800 HVDC architecture initiative,” Navitas Semiconductor CEO and cofounder Gene Sheridan said in a press release on Wednesday evening. “We appreciate that NVIDIA recognizes our technology and commitment to driving the next generation of data center power delivery.”
Shares are up about 170% as of 8:00 a.m. ET.
A post on Nvidia’s technical blog on Tuesday called Navitas a key silicon provider in its new data center infrastructure push.
“Today’s racks in AI factories rely on 54 V DC power distribution, where bulky copper busbars shuttle electricity from rack-mounted power shelves to compute trays. As racks exceed 200 kilowatts, this approach begins to hit physical limits,” like space constraints, massive amounts of copper, and inefficient power conversions, per the post.
Nvidia’s looking to leverage Navitas’ integrated circuits and silicon carbide semiconductors to help improve on these fronts.
Two musings on this:
1) How in the world isn’t some algorithm scraping all of Nvidia’s corporate sites for mentions of companies and taking positions in stocks that had no previously disclosed relationship with the semi designer giant?!?! That developer blog, again, was published on Tuesday. Shares of Navitas were down on Tuesday and down again on Wednesday before Thursday’s surge. Navitas had never been mentioned on any of Nvidia’s technical or corporate blogs, or anywhere else on its site for that matter, before the Tuesday post.
2) More of an aside, on how fickle success can be: take a peek at Wolfspeed. The company cratered this week after filing for bankruptcy, and its fall from grace was certainly exacerbated by Tesla’s decision a couple years ago to use less silicon carbide semiconductors in manufacturing electric vehicles. Now, silicon carbide chips are playing a key role in another company more than doubling.
The Torrance, California-based Navitas went public in 2021 via the SPAC boom.
