Nvidia Pushes AI Into the Driver’s Seat, Oil Stocks Rally on Venezuela Bets, AMD Takes Aim at the Data Center Crown, and Hyundai Bets Big on Humanoid Robots

6th January 2026

The future of artificial intelligence took center stage this week as Nvidia unveiled new AI chips and a self-driving car project with Mercedes, signaling a deeper shift from silicon to real-world machines. Markets also found fresh momentum as energy stocks rallied on expectations that the U.S. could reopen Venezuela’s vast oil fields, lifting oil majors and global indices alike. In the AI arms race, AMD fired back at Nvidia at CES with bold claims about next-generation data center chips, while Hyundai revealed plans to mass-produce humanoid robots, escalating competition with Tesla and a growing field of robotics startups. All this and more in today’s Read It And Eat!

Major Headlines 

• Nvidia Details New A.I. Chips and Autonomous Car Project With Mercedes

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang on Monday announced Alpamayo, a tech platform the company says will help self-driving cars think like humans. "Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions," Huang said on stage at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas.Huang also said Nvidia has begun producing a driverless car powered by its technology, the Mercedes-Benz CLA, in partnership with the German automaker.

The vehicle will be released in the US in the coming months before being rolled out in Europe and Asia. Wearing his trademark black leather jacket, Huang told an audience of hundreds that the project has taught Nvidia "an enormous amount" about how to help partners build robotic systems. Analysts say the announcement reinforces Nvidia's leadership in integrating AI hardware and software, deepening its push into physical AI.

"NVIDIA's pivot toward AI at scale and AI systems as differentiators will help keep it way ahead of rivals," said Paolo Pescatore, analyst at PP Foresight, from Las Vegas. "Alpamayo represents a profound shift for NVIDIA, moving from being primarily a compute to a platform provider for physical AI ecosystems."

Shares of the AI chip designer rose slightly in after-hours trading following Huang's presentation. It featured a video demonstration of the AI-powered Mercedes-Benz driving through San Francisco while a passenger, sat behind the steering wheel, kept their hands in their lap. "It drives so naturally because it learned directly from human demonstrators," Huang said, "but in every single scenario... it tells you what it's going to do, and it reasons about what it's about to do." Alpamayo is an open-source AI model, with the underlying code now available on machine learning platform Hugging Face, where autonomous vehicle researchers can access it for free and retrain the model, Huang said. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," he told the audience. BBC

• Energy stocks rise on hopes Trump will tap Venezuela's vast oil reserves

Energy stocks climbed Monday, fueled by hopes that President Donald Trump's plan to tap Venezuela's sprawling oil reserves will be carried out, following the capture of deposed leader Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces. Shares of Chevron surged as much as 10% at one point in pre-market trading, before ending the day 5.1% higher. Chevron is the only U.S. oil company currently operating in and exporting oil from Venezuela. The price of oil seesawed overnight, but as of 4 p.m. ET Monday, it was trading about 1.8% higher. The price of both U.S. crude oil, known as West Texas Intermediate or WTI, and internationally based Brent crude rose more than $1.

More broadly, investors did not react to the upheaval in Venezuela by selling stocks, as they have in previous times of geopolitical uncertainty. On the contrary, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite wrapped up the trading session up 0.6%.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average outperformed both, soaring more than 594 points, or 1.2%. Chevron was by far the best-performing stock in the 30-stock Dow index. Energy was the best-performing S&P sector Monday, but the financials and consumer discretionary sectors also rallied. 

Internationally, markets climbed as traders likely breathed a sigh of relief that the situation in Venezuela had not deteriorated further. Indexes in Germany, the U.K., Italy, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong all rose in the first trading session since the administration's move in Venezuela.

Monday's the first substantial trading session after the holidays. The future potential for U.S. companies to be able to return to Venezuela's oil fields for the first time in decades boosted the share prices of Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips by around 3%.Shares of firms that supply services to oil giants also jumped. Baker Hughes rose 4.1%, SLB rose 8.9%, and Halliburton closed the day up 7.8%. Venezuela sits on the largest oil reserves in the world, surpassing even those of major oil producing nations like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Russia. CNBC

• AMD reveals new AI PC chips, details next-gen data center chips at CES 2026

AMD (AMD) CEO Lisa Su unveiled the company's upcoming AI data center platform during her keynote at CES 2026 in Las Vegas on Monday, providing a first look at the Helios system and offering more details about how it will be built. Su not only brought out a large Helios rack unit on stage, but also said it was the "world's best AI rack," a direct shot across Nvidia's bow. Nvidia (NVDA) has set the standard for rack scale systems and debuted its latest offering, the Vera Rubin NVL72, at CES on Monday.

Helios will go head-to-head with Nvidia’s own NVL systems, matching its latest NVL72’s 72 Rubin GPUs with 72 of AMD’s MI455X chips. It’s another sign that AMD is working to move further in on Nvidia’s turf in the AI data center market. The company expanded on that effort by providing more information about its upcoming MI500 series data center GPUs, which AMD boldly declares will provide up to a 1,000x increase in AI performance compared to its MI300X GPUs. 

According to Su, that kind of performance jump will be necessary over the coming years. During her keynote, the CEO said AMD believes some 5 billion people will be using AI every day in the next 5 years, and to meet that demand, technology companies will need to increase global computing capacity by 100 times in the coming years. That kind of growth could undoubtedly benefit AMD and Nvidia. AMD has benefited handsomely from both its AI data center businesses over the last year. The company’s stock price increased 76% over the last 12 months, outpacing even that of Nvidia, which rose 30%.  Yahoo.Finance

• Hyundai is taking on Tesla and others in race to mass-produce humanoid robots

Hyundai is joining the global push into robotics, announcing at CES 2026 that it plans to set up a manufacturing system capable of producing thousands of robots per year by 2028.

Atlas is among the most advanced humanoid robots in the world. You've likely seen videos online of the bot doing everything from maneuvering obstacle courses to picking up heavy boxes. Hyundai, which acquired a majority stake in Boston Dynamics in a 2021 deal that valued the company at $1.1 billion, said it will deploy Atlas in its facilities in 2028. 

The bot will focus on parts sequencing  ensuring vehicle parts are placed in the correct areas of a plant when they're needed. The company said that by 2030 it will begin using Atlas for more complex tasks, including component assembly, and eventually for jobs that involve repetitive motions or require heavy lifting and other tasks. On the manufacturing front, Hyundai said it will leverage its Hyundai Mobis auto parts arm and Hyundai Glovis logistics firm to develop an end-to-end robotics value chain that will allow it to produce some 30,000 robots a year. Part of the plan calls for Hyundai to expand its robotics as a service (RaaS) model, in which customers pay for subscription plans to use the Hyundai's robots, to more companies.

Hyundai isn't the only company looking to dominate the robotics space. Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk is keen on making the automaker's Optimus robots the go-to humanoid robots for businesses around the world. Figure is developing humanoid robots for labor-intensive settings, the home, and outer space. Apptronik has its own Apollo humanoid bot, while Agility Robotics' Digit is already being used in some Amazon (AMZN) warehouses. 1X Technologies is already offering its Neo home robot via a $499 per month subscription or $20,000 to own it outright. China's Unitree, meanwhile, sells its humanoid robot G1 for $13,500 and its more advanced H1 for $90,000. Companies like Nvidia (NVDA), which has partnered with Hyundai, are also looking to physical AI and humanoid robotics as the next major breakthrough areas for their processing capabilities. Yahoo.Finance

Minor Headlines 

• Foxconn's Q4 revenue jumps 22% to record high on AI demand Yahoo.Finance

  
  

• 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' reaches $1 billion in global ticket sales at record pace  Reuters

  
  

• Telegram hit by $500mn Russian bond freeze Financial Times

  
  

• Economists favour Hernández de Cos and Knot as next ECB president Financial Times

  
  

• Italy and Pirelli try to end Chinese involvement in tyremaker Financial Times

  
  

• Rome welcomed record 33.5 million pilgrims for Catholic Holy Year Reuters

  
  

• Boston Dynamics’ next-gen humanoid robot will have Google DeepMind DNA TechCrunch

  
  

• Bruno Mars new album incoming  Financial Times