By Nate Wolf
Nvidia itself was, oddly enough, one of the technology stocks moving the least after CEO Jensen Huang's keynote address at the chip maker's GTC conference on Monday afternoon.
Shares slipped less than 0.1% on Tuesday, and the stock is still basically flat on the year. Huang's remarks didn't sway investors.
"We did learn a lot I guess, but just seems to me the previews, hype and anticipation all well exceed the actual near term impact and stock moves into and out of the event," wrote Jordan Klein, an analyst at Mizuho Securities, in a note Tuesday.
The muted reaction from Nvidia and the wider tech sector doesn't mean no stocks were reacting. Huang's comments on optical networking, copper, and robo-taxis, for instance, sparked some moves. As of Tuesday, these names were the winners and losers of GTC 2026:
Robo-Taxis
Huang closed his presentation talking about robo-taxis, saying "the ChatGPT moment of self-driving cars has arrived."
Nvidia announced new partnerships with car makers Hyundai Motor, Nissan Motor, and Geely Automobile Holdings, all of which rose in Asian trading Tuesday. A collaboration with Chinese electric-vehicle company BYD didn't boost the stock, however.
On the ride-hailing side, both Uber Technologies and Lyft announced robo-taxi work with Nvidia.
Uber jumped 4.9% Tuesday after unveiling plans to launch a fleet of autonomous vehicles powered by Nvidia software across 28 cities and four continents by 2028. Lyft surged 3.8% on its own plans to use Nvidia's platforms to enhance the company's machine learning systems and autonomous fleet.
The Nvidia collaboration and the growing roster of car manufacturers equipped with Nvidia software are positive developments for Uber as it attempts to compete with Waymo and Tesla in the U.S. robo-taxi market. The more manufacturers that produce affordable vehicles, the better positioned Uber is to purchase and lease them, analysts at BofA Securities said.
Fiber vs. Copper
Huang claimed the middle ground in the debate over whether optical networking will replace copper for the data transfer between Nvidia's artificial-intelligence chips.
"We will scale up with both copper and co-packaged optics," Huang said. "We need a lot more capacity for copper, we need a lot more capacity for optics."
That wasn't the endorsement fiber or copper bulls wanted. Among the networking companies, Lumentum Holdings, Coherent, and Ciena all started the day lower before swinging to a gain in the afternoon. The glassmaker Corning, which produces fiber, slipped 0.9%.
Amphenol, meanwhile, looked like a big winner at first, jumping more than 5% to start the morning. It was up just 0.5% later in the day. The maker of copper connectors was a Barron's stock pick last year. Fellow copper play Credo Technology plummeted 11%.
Expecting a total win for either optics or copper was never a smart move, Klein said. He favored hedging and balancing positions between copper and optical players in a basket together, even if that strategy meant capping potential returns.
Memory
Huang didn't say anything groundbreaking about memory chips, but what he did say reaffirmed the supply-demand imbalance that has boosted prices and generated huge returns for investors.
"The large language models are going to get larger and larger and larger. It's going to generate more and more tokens more quickly, so it could think more quickly, but it also has to access memory," Huang said when introducing Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI servers. "It's going to pound on memory really hard."
Micron Technology will help solve that problem. Shortly after Huang finished his presentation, the memory chip maker announced that it had begun shipments of high-bandwidth memory designed for the Vera Rubin platform.
Some investors had feared that Korean rivals Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix would take all of the Vera Rubin business. As it turns out, all three may benefit. Micron stock jumped 3.9% on Tuesday. Samsung rose 2.8% in Seoul trading, while SK Hynix fell 0.4%.
Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 17, 2026 14:49 ET (18:49 GMT)
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