CEO Jensen Huang Delivers Keynote Address During Nvidia's GTC Conference

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote at Nvidia’s GTC event in March 2026 (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)

Nvidia pushes further into the autonomous vehicle space to compete with Tesla and Waymo

The tech giant is partnering with Uber and Lyft, sending their stocks higher.

On Monday, Nvidia announced that it was expanding its partnerships with both Uber and Lyft, positioning itself as the technical backbone for future robotaxi fleets as it pushes deeper into the autonomous vehicle market.

Nvidia’s chips have long been widely used in autonomous driving systems, but the company is increasingly building out a full hardware and software platform for self-driving vehicles. Its technology, including its Alpamayo autonomous driving AI models and its DRIVE Hyperion AV platform, is helping enable a growing web of companies to compete with the likes of Tesla and Alphabet’s Waymo, the two leaders in the US robotaxi space.

Shares of Uber and Lyft both rose on the news. Tesla stock was flat.

As Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox expand their robotaxi programs, they are breaking from Tesla’s all-in-one approach as the industry shifts toward a more modular ecosystem — one Nvidia helps power — where companies specialize in different parts of the business. “Nvidia, as you know, is a platform company,” CEO Jensen Huang said at the company’s GTC event yesterday. “We have technology. We have our platforms. We have a rich ecosystem.”

Waymo is currently the furthest along, with its driverless car service available to the public in 10 US cities. Tesla, meanwhile, is hoping to deploy its robotaxi service, which still mostly involves a human in the front seat, to another half dozen markets in addition to Austin and the Bay Area in the first half of this year.

While Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently said Nvidia’s tech wouldn’t apply “competitive pressure” on Tesla for at least five years, the timelines for Nvidia’s latest partnerships seem like that could come much sooner.

Uber expects Nvidia-powered Level 4 robotaxis to launch on its platform in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2027, and hopes to scale to 28 cities globally by 2028. Meanwhile, Zoox, which has relied on Nvidia’s tech for its purpose-built autonomous vehicles since 2017, is currently testing in 10 markets, and planning to deploy more broadly through Uber’s platform.

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Morgan Stanley thinks Tesla’s Terafab could cost an additional $35 billion to $45 billion in capex

Tesla’s Terafab project, which CEO Elon Musk said could launch this week, is poised to be one of the company’s most expensive bets yet. The facility is intended to manufacture the chips needed for Tesla’s autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, and to avoid supply bottlenecks.

If the company reaches its long-term goal of producing 100 million humanoid robots annually, it could require more than 200 million chips a year — over 50x its current demand, Morgan Stanley said.

The firm estimates total capital expenditure for the facility could reach $35 billion to $45 billion, including construction costs and roughly $20 billion to $25 billion for wafer fabrication equipment alone. That spending is not included in Tesla’s already sizable $20 billion capex budget for this year. Morgan Stanley’s semiconductor analysts described the effort as a “Herculean task,” noting the difficulty of building leading-edge chip capabilities from scratch.

While Tesla would likely spread the investment out over several years — even on an aggressive timeline, initial output would likely not arrive until the latter part of the decade — the effort would still weigh heavily on free cash flow and mark a shift toward a more capital-intensive business model.

Tesla’s most expensive factory to date, its Nevada battery plant that it began building in 2014, is estimated to have cost about $10 billion over time — a fraction of the expected Terafab cost.

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Lyft and Uber jump after announcing expanded robotaxi partnerships with Nvidia

Uber and Lyft both announced expanded AI and autonomous vehicle partnerships with Nvidia at the company’s GTC event, sending both ride-hailing stocks up after-hours on Monday and into Tuesday’s premarket session.

Uber is currently up more than 2%, while Lyft has risen around 1.3%.

Uber said Nvidia-powered Level 4 robotaxis will launch on its platform in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2027, with plans to scale to 28 cities globally by 2028. Meanwhile, Lyft said it will use Nvidia’s AI infrastructure to improve ride-matching, mapping, and efficiency, while also using Nvidia’s DRIVE Hyperion platform as a foundation for future autonomous fleets.

Separately, Nvidia announced expanded autonomous driving partnerships with Kia and Hyundai.

The announcements highlight Nvidia’s growing push to provide the AI hardware and software powering next-generation robotaxi networks — packaging the technology needed for self-driving cars into a platform that other companies can use to compete with Tesla.

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Tesla’s Robotaxi program has disclosed its 15th accident, Electrek reports, citing the latest filing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to Electrek’s estimation, extrapolated from the last time Tesla disclosed mileage figures, that amounts to a crash every 57,000 miles — about 9x the rate for humans.

The latest crash involved a Model Y hitting a fixed object at 9 mph in January while the autonomous system was engaged.

Humans are very much still involved with Tesla’s so-called autonomous driving service. Despite the service announcing in January that it had started removing safety monitors from the front seats, only two unsupervised vehicles have been spotted in the last month, per Robotaxi Tracker. The entire fleet has also dwindled from around 50 vehicles to just 35. Their mileage is unavailable.

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Meta’s reported 20% layoff could bring headcount to its lowest level since 2021

Meta is rising Monday morning after Reuters reported the tech giant is planning to lay off 20% of its employees in an effort to use AI to make its workforce more efficient and offset its surging AI capex costs.

On the company’s last earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted 30% efficiency gains for its software engineers and said some “power users” of the company’s AI coding tools saw productivity jump as high as 80% — what some saw as a veiled threat to employees who failed to use AI to boost their output.

Meta’s headcount was nearly 79,000 last quarter, having steadily risen since its layoffs during the self-described “year of efficiency” in 2023. A 20% cut would bring headcount to around 63,000 — the company’s lowest level since 2021.

Shares were recently up 2.7%.