Jensen Huang took the stage at Nvidia’s GTC conference this week in his signature leather jacket to deliver a two-and-a-half-hour keynote, projecting $1 trillion in AI chip sales through 2027, declaring that every company needs an “OpenClaw strategy,” and closing with a rambling Olaf robot that had to get its mic cut. The message was hard to miss: Nvidia wants to be foundational to everything, from AI training to autonomous vehicles to Disney parks.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane breaks down hat Nvidia’s growing web of AI infrastructure partnerships actually means for startups. Plus Travis Kalanick’s complicated comeback and Uber’s $1.25B bet on Rivian.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:20 Garry Tan’s Claude Code setup goes viral at SXSW

03:37 Travis Kalanick is back with a new startup

12:51 Uber and Rivian’s $1.25B RoboTaxi deal

20:54 Chip cooling startup Frore becomes a unicorn

22:56 Nvidia GTC recap: $1 trillion in sales projections

31:42 Elon Musk is rebooting xAI…again

36:37 Outro