AI Daily: Nvidia investing $2B in Synopsys stock

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

NVIDIA, SYNOPSYS PARTNERSHIP: NVIDIA (NVDA) and Synopsys (SNPS) announced an expanded, strategic partnership to advance design and engineering across industries. This expanded partnership will integrate the strengths of NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Synopsys’ market-engineering solutions to deliver capabilities enabling R&D teams to design, simulate and verify intelligent products with greater precision, speed and at lower cost. In addition, NVIDIA invested $2 billion in Synopsys common stock at a purchase price of $414.79 per share. “CUDA GPU-accelerated computing is revolutionizing design – enabling simulation at unprecedented speed and scale, from atoms to transistors, from chips to complete systems, creating fully functional digital twins inside the computer,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Our partnership with Synopsys harnesses the power of NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI to reimagine engineering and design – empowering engineers to invent the extraordinary products that will shape our future.”

BLACK FRIDAY: Amazon’s (AMZN) AI chatbot, Rufus, saw a surge of adoption on Black Friday, according to new data published over the weekend by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reports. In the U.S., Amazon sessions that resulted in a purchase surged 100% on Black Friday compared with the trailing 30 days, while sessions that resulted in a purchase and didn’t include Rufus increased by only 20%. In addition, Amazon saw a 75% day-over-day increase for sessions that included Rufus and resulted in a purchase, compared with just a 35% day-over-day increase for sessions without Rufus that had resulted in a purchase, the author writes.

OPERA BROWSERS: Opera (OPRA) is rolling out new AI capabilities across its Opera One, Opera GX and Opera Neon browsers, providing more than 80 million of Opera’s users with free access to the latest Opera browser AI. The evolution of Opera AI benefits from the expanded long standing partnership between Opera and Google (GOOGL), which now includes integrating the latest Gemini models into its browser AI.

HPE PORTFOLIO: HPE (HPE) announced an expansion of the Nvidia (NVDA) AI Computing by HPE portfolio, introducing new solutions for AI factories, new AI datacenter interconnect to optimize AI workload performance across clusters operating over long distances or within multiple clouds, and the first AI factory lab in the European Union for customers worldwide to test and validate their AI factories.

UPGRADE: Oppenheimer analyst Edward Yang upgraded Cadence Design (CDNS) to Perform from Underperform with a price target of $275, up from $225. The firm has been “skeptical for over a year” due to lack of AI monetization and disruption risks, but Nvidia’s $2B strategic investment in peer Synopsys, while a significant financial endorsement of Cadence’s main rival, is also broadly supportive of legacy EDA and simulation ecosystem sentiment, the analyst tells investors. The firm makes no change to its estimates, but cites a higher multiple for its raised target and rating.