Jensen Huang took the stage at Nvidia&#x27;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&#x27;s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O&#x27;Kane break down what Nvidia&#x27;s growing web of AI infrastructure partnerships actually means for startups, and more of the week&#x27;s headlines. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Travis Kalanick’s return building a &quot;wheelbase for robots&quot; with his new startup Atoms, and the crew has questions about Kalanick’s acquisitions along the way Rivian’s partnership with Uber to build robotaxi versions of its R2 in a deal worth up to $1.25 billion, while pushing back its EBITDA target to do it Frore landing a $1.64 billion valuation for its AI chip cooling systems xAI rebooting, again, with only two of its original eleven co-founders still standing Garry Tan&#x27;s Claude Code setup went viral at SXSW (Spoiler: the crew is not impressed). 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&#x27;s Claude Code setup goes viral at SXSW 03:37 Travis Kalanick is back with a new startup 12:51 Uber and Rivian&#x27;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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nvidia has an OpenClaw strategy. Do you?

Equity

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Equity

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_A] Presented by.Tech Domains, where tech founders find sharp, memorable names for their tech startups.

[SPEAKER_B] Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, March 20th, and I'm Kirsten Korosec, transportation editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined by our weekend editor Anthony Ha and our senior reporter Sean O'Kane. Anthony, what's new this week? Anything exciting happen?

[SPEAKER_C] [Speaker:Jensen Huang] I mean, so many things. One of them that I wanted to start with was something that happened at South by Southwest, which is, I know you are recently back from, but there was this session with Garry Tan of Y Combinator that got a lot of people talking, and he was talking about his Claude Code setup, which I think a lot of people were excited about, but not necessarily for positive reasons. Did either of you follow this?

[SPEAKER_B] [Speaker:Kirsten Korosec] Well, yes, I wasn't able to be at that session, but I was on the ground at South by, and luckily we had someone else on staff tuning into it. And yeah, cyberpsychosis, it's a whole new thing. And it's when you have so much stoke for AI that you actually don't sleep very often and you don't even, according to Garry Tan, don't even have to take drugs anymore for it, which is great.

[SPEAKER_C] Julie's story about this has a line that says, we confirmed with Tan's assistant that he was joking. So he's, he's not actually saying he has cyberpsychosis.

[SPEAKER_B] Of course.

[SPEAKER_C] But it just like, was this very elaborate setup to just be like, I'm very excited about AI agents, including this setup myself. I mean, in general, the way I think there's a certain kind of founder talks about AI agents as if they're, you know, the second coming, um, that is very alienating to somebody like me who is kind of interested, but does not think that they are going, that they're the most amazing thing where I'm going to, you know, lose 4 hours of sleep every night.

[SPEAKER_D] [Speaker:SEAN OKANE] I think you're not thinking big enough.

[SPEAKER_C] Often the case.

[SPEAKER_D] Anthony, I think we've seen Silicon Valley become obsessed with, what is it, 669 or, you know, adopting the sort of extreme work-life balance or imbalance that we've seen in China. And I think, you know, with what, what Garry was showing off with his setup, I think we're, we're this much closer to just like 525,600, you know, like, like hustle culture is about to hit 100% and it's never going to stop.

[SPEAKER_C] [Speaker:ANTHONY_HA] And we should mention that, I mean, what he was actually trying to promote both at the session and then afterwards, or the thing that really kind of took off beyond the idea of cyberpsychosis was this specific setup that he had with Claude Code that he then shared. And then shared some fairly hyperbolic praise about how like one CTO told him that basically every other ...

Nvidia has an OpenClaw strategy. Do you?

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Nvidia has an OpenClaw strategy. Do you?

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.