Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Tuesday, March 17th. In today's episode, we'll tell you the big announcements coming from NVIDIA's GTC conference. We'll also tell you why OpenAI is hitting the panic button again.
Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why we might not be getting quarterly earnings reports in the near future. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets kicked off the week on a strong note, bouncing back from last week's sell-off. The S&P 500 was up 1% on Monday, while the NASDAQ did even better, jumping 1.2%. At this point, the playbook is pretty simple.
When oil prices go down, stocks go up. And that's exactly what happened on Monday. Oil dropped about 5%, with WTI falling to around $93 a barrel, as investors started to feel a little bit less panicked about the Middle East situation and the Strait of Hormuz reopening. So that was enough to spark a relief rally across the board.
Chapter 2: What major announcements did Nvidia make at the GTC conference?
Literally every sector finished in the green yesterday. You know, when you zoom out over the last couple of weeks, I think it's pretty impressive that the S&P 500 is only down 2.6% since the start of the war back on February 28th. And the NASDAQ is only down 1.2%. The same can't be said about international stocks, though.
Stock markets in Japan, South Korea, France, and Switzerland are all down 8% to 10% this month. So U.S. stocks are outperforming here. And I think a big reason for that is the U.S. economy is probably less exposed to the energy shock from the war compared to the rest of the world. So, you know, I'm not that surprised to see U.S.
stocks hold up better compared to international stocks in this environment. What I am surprised to see, though, is crypto outperforming gold. Bitcoin has gone up 10% to $74,000 since the war started, while Ethereum has gone up 20% crossing the $2,300 range. Gold, on the other hand, is down 5%, dropping to near $5,000 an ounce. So yeah, interesting things are happening in the markets right now.
And then looking ahead, we have a Fed meeting coming up tomorrow and some inflation data coming out as well. We're staying on top of all of it. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines. starting with NVIDIA.
NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, took center stage at NVIDIA's annual GTC Developer Conference on Monday, kicking off a four-day event with a two and a half hour keynote speech designed to remind the audience and Wall Street that the company is still the dominant player when it comes to AI. Now Jensen was decked out on his classic leather jacket, making some bold statements.
The one making the headlines was that Nvidia now expects to generate at least $1 trillion in revenue from their Blackwell and Rubin AI chips through the end of 2027. That's a big jump from their previous forecast of $500 billion in revenue through 2026. So they think the AI boom will extend into another year.
Jensen also shut off some new products, including a new CPU and a new AI system built using technology from a startup called Grok. Now, just to be clear here, I'm not talking about Elon Musk's Grok chatbot. This is Grok with a Q. It's a chip startup that Nvidia basically absorbed through a licensing deal back in December.
This acquisition by Nvidia was very underrated because Grok makes chips that are designed to make AI inference way faster. And Jensen thinks that we are approaching an inference inflection moment when it comes to AI computing. See, inference is when AI models actually answer your questions or run tasks. And the reason the demand for that is exploding is because of the rise of AI agents.
So now NVIDIA is building a full stack product for inference, combining their upcoming Vera Rubin chips with their new Grok power processors to position themselves as the dominant player for inference. And looking beyond just chips, NVIDIA also shared some details about their new robo-taxi partnership with Uber.
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