Nvidia's Big Announcement

January 6, 2026

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Yesterday, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia made THREE big announcements.  As you'll see, these announcements had market-moving impacts for a bunch of stocks.

Announcement #1

First, he unveiled its next generation of AI chips — the “Vera Rubin” platform.  These chips will have 5x more AI computing power than its current Blackwell platform.  This is putting a damper on the stocks from companies offering competing AI chip offerings, including AMD and GOOGL.

Importantly, the Vera Rubin will be incredibly more energy efficient, requiring much less cooling infrastructure.   This is hurting the stocks today of some of the industrial HVAC companies who have benefited from the increased demands of cooling infrastructure.  These stocks include:  Johnson Controls (JCI), Train Tech (TT), and Comfort Systems (FIX).  It’s also hurting the “power provider” stocks, including Constellation Energy (CEG) and GE Vernova (GEV).

Announcement #2

Second, Jensen announced an open-source AI model for self-driving cars (called Alpamayo).  Unlike current self-driving systems that simply react to sensors, Alpamayo "reasons" through scenarios like a human would.  (That’s a little scary to be honest.)  They will launch with Mercedes Benz in 1Q’26!  Needless to say, this is bad news for Tesla (TSLA) and Waymo (owned by GOOGL).  Both stocks are trading lower today.  

Announcement #3

Third, he announced two technical breakthroughs in AI data centers in networking and memory.  The memory announcement is a new memory layer that allows for a quicker response to long AI questions.  The networking announcement involves using lasers, rather than copper and fiber, resulting in much faster switches.   Sandisk and the other short-term memory stocks are getting a big boost from the memory announcement.    (WDC, STX, MU, etc).  But it’s putting pressure on the networking and connector related stocks, including Arista (ANET) and Amphenol (APH).  

Net-net, these announcements were a positive for NVDA and the memory stocks.  And on average, they seem to be a negative for nearly every other AI related stock that sells “picks and shovels”.