Nvidia Stock Rises After Alibaba AI Deal. How Robots Offer a Fresh Path to Gains.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke at the a Vivatech conference in June, showcasing robots. (THIBAUD MORITZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Key Points

About This Summary

• Nvidia’s stock increased by 0.8% in premarket trading after announcing an AI partnership with Alibaba.
• Alibaba will integrate Nvidia’s AI development tools for physical AI, including robots and self-driving cars.
• The collaboration involves developing AI capabilities such as training models, data synthesis, and environmental simulation.

Nvidia stock rose following its latest artificial-intelligence deal with Chinese tech titan Alibaba.

The chip maker’s shares were up 0.8% to $179.71 in premarket trading, following a 2.8% drop in the previous session.

Coming into Wednesday trading, Nvidia stock is up 33% so far this year, outpacing the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes. However, it’s struggled for direction since the company’s latest earnings report in late August.

Nvidia is joining with Alibaba to integrate its tools for physical AI such as robots and self-driving cars, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said Wednesday, according to multiple media reports.

Alibaba’s AI cloud platform will include the full range of Nvidia’s physical AI software stack, the company said at the Apsara developer conference in Hangzhou. The China-based company said it would join with the leading U.S. chip maker to develop AI capabilities including training models, data synthesis, environmental simulation and validation testing.

It appears to be a significant partnership between two leading players in AI. It brings together Nvidia with one of China’s top-cloud computing and service providers.

It could be seen as a positive development after Alibaba and other Chinese companies were banned by Beijing from using Nvidia’s chips and could offer another way for the company to expand its AI footprint in the world’s second-largest economy.

The announcement followed Wu pledging to hike Alibaba’s AI spending beyond $50 billion and revealed its AI large-language model Qwen3-Max, containing more than one trillion parameters. Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares soared nearly 10% in premarket trading.

It comes as Nvidia is making an increasingly large footprint in the broader AI space. Earlier this week it revealed plans to invest some $100 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI —just days after announcing a multibillion-dollar deal with Intel .

Write to Elsa Ohlen at elsa.ohlen@barrons.com