Lucid and Bolt Partner to Deploy 25,000 Autonomous Vehicles in Europe

Einride shares jumped about 12% in premarket trading to $4.41 on Monday after the autonomous-freight company unveiled a strategic collaboration with Nvidia. Under the deal, Einride will use Nvidia's Blackwell computing architecture through a validated cloud partner to train, test and refine its autonomous-driving models, and will adapt Nvidia's DRIVE Hyperion compute, sensor, software and safety architecture for heavy-duty trucking, while using Nvidia Cosmos in its development and validation workflow. Stockholm-based Einride operates electric and autonomous freight networks for corporate customers across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, combining Freight-Capacity-as-a-Service with software built on its Saga AI platform. Einride expects its fleet to reach roughly 1,500 to 2,000 vehicles by 2028, with about 80% of the demand represented by that network potentially suitable for automation over the medium term. The agreement lands as Einride ramps aggressively elsewhere: first-half 2026 constant-currency revenue rose 26% to $27 million, management expects second-half growth of 60% to 73%, the company has announced a 500-truck Tesla Semi deployment, and it is targeting cash-flow breakeven in 2028, with a $77 million cash position reported at June 30.

Western Digital is increasingly tying its hard-disk-drive demand outlook to the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, with management pointing to neoclouds, frontier AI labs and sovereign AI initiatives as additional drivers that could extend the company's growth trajectory. On its last earnings call, management said these emerging customers are seeking HDDs for their economic benefits amid rising storage demands, and that tight HDD supply is creating opportunities for increased pricing leverage. Western Digital also cited growing storage requirements from physical AI companies and expects physical AI to contribute to growth in calendar 2027 and beyond, noting that an autonomous-vehicle customer's calendar 2027 exabyte requirement has increased multi-fold. The opportunity is unfolding in a competitive space: Western Digital competes directly with Seagate Technology in HDDs, while NetApp competes for AI storage spending through all-flash and hybrid-flash solutions. Seagate's HAMR-based products represented approximately 40% of its nearline exabyte shipment run rate at the end of fiscal 2026, and NetApp's all-flash array revenues came in at $1.31 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2027, up 47% from the prior-year quarter. Over the past 60 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for Western Digital's fiscal 2027 earnings has been revised up 8.8% to $20.03 per share.

Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch said Tesla is unlikely to generate meaningful sales revenue from its Optimus humanoid robot before 2029, pushing his Optimus ramp assumptions out by two quarters. Following a visit to Tesla's Austin operations, Rusch said the company pointed to finalizing the hardware design for Optimus's initial ramp and is targeting first commercial revenue in late 2027, but he wrote that Street expectations for humanoid revenue scale-up are overly optimistic, citing hardware and operating software complexity and supply chain preparedness. Rusch, who rates Tesla at Perform, was more upbeat on other parts of the business, saying the Cybercab is ramping and driving manufacturing costs materially lower, with a modular design enabling parallel production and up to 40% mass reduction, and describing Tesla's 50% to 60% robotaxi cost advantage as becoming a reality. He also flagged Tesla's push into semiconductor manufacturing as bold but critically important, with a pilot facility tracking toward a $25 billion-plus capital spending target. Oppenheimer kept its 2026 revenue estimate at $105 billion but trimmed 2027 to $108.8 billion, reflecting the slower Optimus ramp offset by faster Cybercab production.