Nvidia Unveils Robot Training Tech, New Gaming Chips, and Toyota Deal

He’s their biggest fan (Artur Widak/Getty Images)

Nvidia’s key partners are rallying after shout-outs from CEO Jensen Huang

Everything from fellow chipmakers to automakers are benefiting from the halo effect.

1/7/25 9:29AM

When CEO Jensen Huang delivered his keynote speech at CES on Monday evening, he expressed excitement about not only Nvidia, but also the company’s many publicly traded partners working toward intertwining AI with the real world.

And, no surprise, a lot of those companies are ripping higher on Tuesday morning.

Micron

Huang revealed that the firm will source from Micron for its new GPUs:

“So two dual shaders: one is for floating point, one is for integer. G7 memory from Micron, 1.8 terabytes per second, twice the performance of our last generation.”

KION and Accenture

Nvidia is working with KION GROUP and Accenture to make warehouses more efficient.

“There are millions of factories, hundreds of thousands of warehouses. That basically is the backbone of a $50 trillion manufacturing industry. All of that has to become software defined. All of it has to have automation in the future and all of it will be infused with robotics.
Well, we’re partnering with KION, the world’s leading warehouse automation solutions provider, and Accenture, the world’s largest professional services provider, and they have a big focus in digital manufacturing. And we’re working together to create something that’s really special...”

Toyota

While Huang name-dropped nearly every big electrified-vehicle maker, he specifically shouted out a partnership with Toyota.

“We’re working with just about every major car company around the world: Waymo and Zoox and Tesla, of course, and their data center; BYD, the largest EV company in the world; JLR’s got a really cool car coming; Mercedes, a fleet of cars coming with Nvidia, starting with — starting this year going into production. And I’m super, super pleased to announce that today, Toyota and Nvidia are going to partner together to create their next-generation AVs.
Just so many cool companies — Lucid, and Rivian, and Xiaomi, and of course Volvo. Just so many different companies. Waabi is building self-driving trucks. Aurora, we announced this week also that Aurora is going to use Nvidia to build self-driving trucks.”

Mediatek

Shares gained 4.6% in Taiwan after Huang said this about the joint effort to produce a superchip:

“This is the chip that’s inside. It is in production. This top-secret chip we did in collaboration, the CPU, the Grace CPU, is built for Nvidia in collaboration with MediaTek. They’re the world’s leading SoC company, and they worked with us to build this CPU, the CPU SoC, and connect it with chip-to-chip NVLink to the Blackwell GPU.”

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AI “bottleneck” stocks are the big winners halfway through a tumultuous week

Memory stocks and chip machinery companies are bouncing Wednesday, following a strong Oracle earnings report that bolstered confidence in the durability of the AI data center build-out.

In fact, Sandisk is the top performer of the S&P 500 so far this week, rising more than 21% from Friday’s close, as of shortly after 2 p.m. ET. Memory chip maker Micron is second in line, up more than 13% in weekly gains, and hard disk drive maker Western Digital is also getting a lift.

Other big winners so far this week are some of the so-called semicap shares — makers of the ultraprecise machines that turn silicon into actual semiconductors — with Lam Research and KLA Corp both racking up gains of about 10% on the week. Applied Materials is up about 8% this week.

Thematically speaking, both memory stocks like Sandisk and Micron as well as semicap shares like KLA have been part of the “buy the bottleneck” trade, in which investors buy companies they believe sit at key pinch points in the AI supply chain and therefore have pretty tremendous pricing power. Through that lens, the stocks’ bounce might reflect some additional excitement about the durability of the data center boom after Oracle’s results, which included a larger-than-expected capex number as well as sales guidances that was higher than Wall Street was forecasting.

But the bounce also may be the less interesting market phenomenon of mean reversion rearing its head, as these stocks were also some of the most beaten down in the S&P 500 last week, when Sandisk lost 17% and Lam lost about 15%, for example. So, some snapback may merely be a market reflex.

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Papa John’s spikes following report of a $47-per-share take-private offer from Qatari investment fund Irth Capital

A few weeks after announcing it would close 300 stores by the end of next year, Papa John’s is drawing fresh take-private interest from Irth Capital, an investment fund backed by a member of the Qatari royal family.

Papa John’s shares were up 19% on Wednesday afternoon, on pace for their best day since February 2025.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Irth is offering $47 per share for PZZA, valuing the company at about $1.5 billion. The fund currently holds a roughly 10% stake in Papa John’s, per the report.

Irth has tried to take Papa John’s private before, offering $60 per share in a joint bid with Apollo Global in June of last year. In October, Apollo Global again offered to take the company private at $64 per share. That offer was later withdrawn.

Broadly, the pizza category is being increasingly dominated by Domino’s, which opened 700 stores globally last year and has a market cap 9x greater than Irth’s latest reported offer for Papa John’s.

Exclusive | Papa John’s Draws Fresh Takeover Interest

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