On Tuesday, all eyes on Wall Street were once again on NVIDIA, as the chip giant surpassed Microsoft with a market capitalization of $3.3 trillion, making it the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. However, NVIDIA’s rise to the top of the stock market was not the only news. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a partnership with NVIDIA at its Discover Conference, and a startup specializing in autonomous trucks is also set to benefit from NVIDIA’s investment.
NVIDIA and HPE Aim to Bring More Generative AI to Businesses
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA are teaming up to accelerate the industrial revolution of generative AI. The companies announced a new partnership named “NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE” on Tuesday. According to a press release, the two firms plan to develop several AI solutions together, aimed at helping businesses adopt generative AI more swiftly.
To unlock the immense potential of generative AI in businesses, HPE and NVIDIA have developed a turnkey private cloud for AI. This solution allows companies to focus their resources on developing new AI use cases that can enhance productivity and open new revenue streams,” said HPE CEO Antonio Neri in the release. The HPE Private Cloud AI is said to feature the most profound integration yet of NVIDIA AI computing, networking, and software with HPE’s AI storage and computing, the statement added. According to “MarketWatch,” during the Discover Conference, Neri explained that businesses could start using large language models pre-trained on public data and further train them in a secure private cloud with their own data, thereby creating their own private AI system. He referred to this process as “retraining the model directly with their own private data.”
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang also expressed enthusiasm for the new cooperation. “Never before have NVIDIA and HPE integrated their technologies so deeply—combining the entire NVIDIA AI computing stack with HPE’s private cloud technology—to equip enterprise customers and AI experts with the most advanced computing infrastructure and services, pushing the boundaries of AI,” he said in the press release.
The stock market responded positively to the expanded partnership between NVIDIA and HPE. HPE’s stock rose by 1.44% on the NYSE on Tuesday, closing at $21.84, and continued to climb in after-hours trading with an additional gain of 1.42% to $22.15. NVIDIA’s stock also performed well, increasing by 3.51% on the NASDAQ to $135.58 during regular trading hours, with an additional after-hours gain of 0.6% to $136.40.
NVIDIA Invests in Autonomous Driving Startup Waabi
Additionally, it was announced on Tuesday that NVIDIA has invested in the startup Waabi. The autonomous truck startup revealed, according to “CNBC,” that it raised $200 million in an oversubscribed funding round. New investors, including NVIDIA, Porsche, and Volvo’s venture capital arm, joined existing backers Uber and Khosla Ventures. The specific amounts each contributed were not disclosed.
Waabi is developing fully driverless trucks expected to launch in 2025. Unlike its competitors, the startup relies entirely on generative AI instead of real-world test drives. According to “CNBC,” Waabi has developed an AI system that automatically generates all possible scenarios a self-driving vehicle might encounter in the real world. “A system like this has remarkable generalization capabilities and can handle the unknown efficiently. It can be trained more efficiently, and its safety can be mathematically validated and verified,” Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun said, as reported by “CNBC.” This approach is also expected to save resources and money.
