Aurora Innovation Stock Post Biggest One-Day Gain In Over 3 Years On Nvidia Self-Driving Tech Partnership: Retail Mood In Top Gear

Aurora Innovation, Inc. ($AUR) shares climbed sharply early Tuesday as traders reacted to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company’s announcement regarding a long-term partnership with Nvidia Corp. ($NVDA) and Contential for deploying driverless trucks at scale.

The announcement was made in conjunction with the Computer Electronics Show (CES) being held in Las Vegas.

Aurora Innovation provides an SAE L4 self-driving system called Aurora Driver, designed to operate in multiple vehicle types. 

The company is in the final stages of validating  Aurora Driver for driverless operations on public roads. It plans to launch its driverless trucking service in Texas in April 2025.

The three-way agreement allows Nvidia’s Thor system-on-chip (SoC) and DriveOS to be integrated into its Aurora Driver. 

Automotive supplier Continental and Aurora Innovation plan to manufacture self-driving hardware at scale in 2027, with a production sample of DRIVE Thor coming in the first half of 2025. 

The companies said DRIVE Thor, built on Nvidia Blackwell architecture, will accelerate inference tasks critical for autonomous vehicles to understand and navigate the world around them.

Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder at Aurora Innovation said, “NVIDIA is the market leader in accelerated computing, and they’ll strengthen our ecosystem of partners and our ability to deliver safe and reliable driverless trucks to our customers at scale.”

Rishi Dhall, vice president of automotive at NVIDIA, said, ‘’The combination of NVIDIA’s automotive-grade DRIVE Thor platform with Aurora’s advanced self-driving trucking technology and Continental’s manufacturing and integration expertise is set to help drive the future of autonomous trucking, helping make roads safer while driving up operational efficiency.”

AUR sentiment and message volume January 7, 2025, as of 10:17 am ET | Source: Stocktwits

Retail sentiment toward Aurora Innovation improved to ‘extremely bullish’ (96/100), highest in over a year, from ‘bearish’ a day ago. Message volume improved to ‘extremely high’ levels.

Some retail watchers of the stock on Stocktwits are positioning for more gains.

Another hinted at a short squeeze. Yahoo Finance data show that 6.39% of the float is shorted.

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Aurora Innovation stock was last seen up 38% at $8.81, on more than four times the average volume. This marked the biggest one-day gain since mid-November 2021.

In 2024, the shares gained 44%. 

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