As Tesla's stock falls, Elon Musk brushes off Nvidia's competitive threat

By William Gavin Nvidia is ramping up its work on driverless-vehicle technology, a field dominated by Tesla and a few others. But Musk doesn't see an imminent reason to worry. Elon Musk and Jensen Huang have built a working relationship over the years, including a recently announced plan for Musk's xAI and Huang's Nvidia to develop a large data center in Saudi Arabia. Nvidia is making a bid to challenge the dominance of Tesla and a handful of others in the autonomous-vehicle business. For now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he isn't worried. "I'm not losing any sleep about this," Musk wrote on X, his social-media platform, in a post late on Monday. "And I genuinely hope they succeed." Don't miss: Mobileye's latest win is another rejection of Tesla's self-driving approach Nvidia (NVDA) on Monday revealed a lineup of open-source autonomous-driving models named Alpamayo, which it said will bring to bear "humanlike" decision making. The company said its models will be capable of using reasoning to navigate rare or tricky scenarios, rather than traditional rules-based approaches that might have more difficulty covering the array of unpredictable situations that vehicles face. The new family of models could boost Nvidia's profile in the growing AV industry, which the company sees as a huge opportunity. Nvidia began working on self-driving-vehicle technology eight years ago and has several thousand employees in that division, according to CEO Jensen Huang. "There's no question in my mind now that this is going to be one of the largest robotics industries," Huang said Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show. "Our vision is that, someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous." Read: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers some good news for investors at CES Uber Technologies (UBER), Jaguar Land Rover and Lucid Group (LCID) are interested in using Alpamayo to develop fully driverless vehicles, according to statements from company executives. All three are already working with Nvidia on self-driving tech, as is BYD (CN:002594), the Chinese electric-vehicle maker that outsold Tesla (TSLA) in 2025. Mercedes-Benz (XE:MBG) (MBGYY) on Monday said it plans to launch CLA vehicles with advanced driver-assistance features similar to what Tesla offers later this year. Lucid and Uber this week also unveiled a production-intent vehicle designed for a robotaxi service. The launch of Alpamayo means that car companies can buy or license various levels of driverless technology from Nvidia, according to Gary Black, managing partner at the Future Fund, which lists Nvidia as its sixth-biggest holding. Eventually, that could result in more competition for Tesla, Alphabet-backed Waymo and other firms developing driverless cars. Musk thinks otherwise. Part of that is because developing driverless software that performs better than humans is a laborious effort that can take years. "The legacy car companies won't design the cameras and AI computers into their cars at scale until several years after that," Musk wrote on X. "So this is maybe a competitive pressure on Tesla in 5 or 6 years, but probably longer." Read: Less traffic, more lounge time, cheaper homes? How robotaxis promise a whole new world. Investors, though, are rewarding Nvidia on Tuesday, while Tesla's stock is under selling pressure. Nvidia's stock is up 1.6%, and Tesla's is off about 3%. Nvidia also announced on Monday "the next generation of AI," a reference to its Vera Rubin line of chips, which the company plans to begin shipping later this year. The lineup promises big performance and cost-efficiency improvements over the current Blackwell platform, according to Nvidia. Tesla and xAI have relationships with Nvidia, and Musk said in Nvidia's release that the Rubin chips are a "rocket engine" for AI that will "remind the world that Nvidia is the gold standard." Tesla has used Nvidia's chips in its data centers, although it plans to lessen its reliance on the chip maker. Meanwhile, xAI is working with Nvidia on a large data center being built in Saudi Arabia and is expected to adopt the Rubin platform. On social media, Musk added that "it will take another 9 months or so before the hardware is operational at scale and the software works well," referring to the Rubin platform. Read on: As AMD chases Nvidia, here's how it's positioning itself for the future of AI -William Gavin This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. (END) Dow Jones Newswires 01-06-26 1100ET