NVIDIA, a self driving technology company that may have overplayed its partnership with Uber (they had only sold Uber GPUs, not any automated vehicle systems) saw its stock plummet by as much as 10%, losing billion of dollars in valuation, after the accident.
In San Jose, home of NVIDIA and its annual developers conference, founder and CEO Jensen Huang can’t escape questions about the incident, which comes up in Q&A sessions as well as on a televised segment of CNBC Money shot on the show floor.
While the death may not be attributable to NVIDIA, Jensen Huang is taking a path of cautions when he say “We are pausing, so we can learn,” as he suspends public-road testing for NVIDIA cars.
For NVIDIA, maker of, GPUs (graphic processing units) was known as “just a chip company” but business is now about where those chips are used. Quite a few of them are used in and for self driving vehicles. An AV [automated vehicle] is a rolling data center, says Jensen Huang.
This year, the exhibit hall seems bigger than ever, with hundreds of vendors. NVIDIA’s self driving tech is displayed proudly. Uber is conspicuously absent.
Self driving cars on display at NVIDIA's user conference, GTC 2018. We're not slowing down, says NVIDIA. If anything, the accident in Arizona will only further the need for our technology.
But the incident has brought more than unwanted questions to the conference, it has put a cloud over the automotive and computing industries. Tech company executives at the show are nervous, wondering where the shoe will fall, how the incident will affect their business with impending legislation and restraints. Many companies at GTC are small, startups seeking funding to grow their business.
Public perception of technology will no doubt suffer. A general mistrust of robots, drones, self driving cars… it seems unfair to technology executives, including Jensen Huang.
We are in the business of making cars and roads safer, he says.
He has a point.
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