Are Nvidia's new partnerships adding value to AI trade?

At Nvidia's (NVDA) 2025 GTC (GPU Technology Conference) event on Tuesday, CEO Jensen Huang revealed a plethora of new AI partnerships with companies such as Nokia (NOK), Uber Technologies (UBER), Palantir (PLTR), CrowdStrike (CRWD), Lucid (LCID), and Stellantis (STLA).

Intelligent Alpha Founder and CEO Doug Clinton comments on the value these companies could be bringing to the AI ecosystem by partnering with Nvidia. This all comes after Nvidia became the first company in history to achieve a market cap of $5 trillion on Wednesday.

Also hear Doug Clinton's other thoughts around AI capex spending.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Catalysts.

Video Transcript

00:00 Julia

Doug, what's also interesting is that the raft of partnerships that Nvidia announced during that Washington DC GPT. I mean, everything from Uber to Lucid, we've got a list of some of them up on the screen here. Nokia, that was an interesting and surprising one. Um, so there's this the ecosystem continues to grow, right? Originally, we talked a lot about the circular economy with Open AI at the center of that. And now you have all these other companies that aren't squarely in the AI business that are doing all of this.

00:43 Julia

Does that mean that the potential for growth is expanding or is it also that the potential for risk is expanding?

00:59 Doug

I think it's probably Julia an embrace of what these sorts of announcements of a partnership does for stock prices. I mean, I think uh management teams are acutely aware of the reality that if you announce a deal with Nvidia or Open AI, uh you're probably going to have a pretty good day on the stock market.

01:21 Julia

Well, okay, so Doug, so that's that's a little bit of a cynical view, a realistic view, but like, so so how real then is it? Like, you know, you've seen it's not just Nvidia, like people are saying, oh, you throw chat GBT in an announcement and the stock goes up, but is it actually going to yield more profits for shareholders at the end of the day?

01:43 Doug

I and that's the perfect point because that's actually all that matters at the end of the day. The way that we have thought about this whole circular economy question is yes, there are a lot of partnerships, everybody feels like they are entangled, but the only thing that matters at the end of the day, when we kind of look out 3, five, seven years from now is does this technology create incremental cash flows that justify all of this spending. It's not going to do it this year, it's not going to do it next year, and no one should expect that. But I think when we think about that longer term picture, five and seven years, ultimately that will be the determined about whether these are good partnerships, whether these are good deals or not.

02:37 Doug

I think that when we see ones with, you know, an Uber for example, Nvidia maybe is a little bit uh outside of that. But the question is just, you know, what are we really going to see from a deal perspective? What can that really add to Uber's core business? And maybe there's something there that we're not aware of yet, but those feel like they're a little bit more on the very heavy optionality side versus the potential to add incremental value to the AI trade.

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