Finance

Nvidia’s auto segment revenue surges to record high on demand for driver-assist tech

Published

2 months ago

February 27, 2025

Signage at the Nvidia Corp. offices in Taipei, Taiwan, on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. Photographer: An Rong Xu/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

U.S. chipmaker Nvidia‘s auto segment revenue more than doubled in the latest quarter to a record high on strong demand for driver-assist software.

While the company’s biggest revenue stream by far is chip systems that power artificial intelligence, Nvidia has predicted its products that power driver-assist technology could become its next “billion-dollar” business.

Revenue of Nvidia’s automotive and robotics segment rose 103% year on year to $570 million in the fourth quarter of the 2025 fiscal year. That brought the segment’s revenue for the fiscal year to $1.69 billion, above $1 billion for a second-straight year.

The latest increase in revenue was due to to sales of Nvidia’s “self-driving platforms,” according to the company’s CFO.

“This growth highlights Nvidia’s increasing exposure to powering ADAS, autonomous vehicles, and robotics through its DRIVE platform and related technologies,” Brady Wang, semiconductor analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in an email.

CEO Jensen Huang said in Nvidia’s earnings call the company expects that “every single one” of the 1 billion cars on the roads today “will be robotic cars” that collect data which Nvidia-supported AI systems can help refine, according to a FactSet transcript.

Will likely see a 'buoyant tone' from Nvidia sell-side, says Ritholtz' Josh Brown

Automotive and robotics is “getting ready to take off,” likely due to investments in autonomous vehicles such as Waymo and Tesla, Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said in an email. Munster also estimated that around 15 companies are building humanoid robots, potentially increasing demand for Nvidia chips.

“The performance of that segment is an important story below the fold that’s not getting much attention because it’s small,” he added, “but they can be a much bigger part of revenue going forward.”

Autos and robotics unit currently accounts for 1.45% of Nvidia’s total revenue.

Counterpoint’s Wang expects this growth to continue with Nvidia’s “increasing adoption of L2+ and more advanced systems”.

Several Chinese electric car companies, including BYD, Nio and Zeekr, use Nvidia’s driver-assist chip systems.

“In addition to autonomous driving, I also anticipate that robotics and physical AI will experience a hype,” Wang added, “followed by real-world applications in the coming years, sustaining the long-term growth of this sector.”

Finance

More Americans buy groceries with buy now, pay later loans

Published

4 hours ago

April 26, 2025

Business Finance News

People shop for produce at a Walmart in Rosemead, California, on April 11, 2025.

Frederic J. Brown | Afp | Getty Images

A growing number of Americans are using buy now, pay later loans to buy groceries, and more people are paying those bills late, according to new Lending Tree data released Friday.

The figures are the latest indicator that some consumers are cracking under the pressure of an uncertain economy and are having trouble affording essentials such as groceries as they contend with persistent inflation, high interest rates and concerns around tariffs.

In a survey conducted April 2-3 of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 79, around half reported having used buy now, pay later services. Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said.

Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found.

Lending Tree’s chief consumer finance analyst, Matt Schulz, said that of those respondents who said they paid a BNPL bill late, most said it was by no more than a week or so.

“A lot of people are struggling and looking for ways to extend their budget,” Schulz said. “Inflation is still a problem. Interest rates are still really high. There’s a lot of uncertainty around tariffs and other economic issues, and it’s all going to add up to a lot of people looking for ways to extend their budget however they can.”

“For an awful lot of people, that’s going to mean leaning on buy now, pay later loans, for better or for worse,” he said.

He stopped short of calling the results a recession indicator but said conditions are expected to decline further before they get better.

“I do think it’s going to get worse, at least in the short term,” said Schulz. “I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of reason to expect these numbers to get better in the near term.”

The loans, which allow consumers to split up purchases into several smaller payments, are a popular alternative to credit cards because they often don’t charge interest. But consumers can see high fees if they pay late, and they can run into problems if they stack up multiple loans. In Lending Tree’s survey, 60% of BNPL users said they’ve had multiple loans at once, with nearly a fourth saying they have held three or more at once.

“It’s just really important for people to be cautious when they use these things, because even though they can be a really good interest-free tool to help you kind of make it from one paycheck to the next, there’s also a lot of risk in mismanaging it,” said Schulz. “So people should tread lightly.”

Lending Tree’s findings come after Billboard revealed that about 60% of general admission Coachella attendees funded their concert tickets with buy now, pay later loans, sparking a debate on the state of the economy and how consumers are using debt to keep up their lifestyles. A recent announcement from DoorDash that it would begin accepting BNPL financing from Klarna for food deliveries led to widespread mockery and jokes that Americans were struggling so much that they were now being forced to finance cheeseburgers and burritos.

Over the last few years, consumers have held up relatively well, even in the face of persistent inflation and high interest rates, because the job market was strong and wage growth had kept up with inflation — at least for some workers.

Earlier this year, however, large companies including Walmart and Delta Airlines began warning that the dynamic had begun to shift and they were seeing cracks in demand, which was leading to worse-than-expected sales forecasts.