WeRide’s Stock Price Surged Again, with the Support of NVIDIA’s Million-Share Position

On February 18th local time, the three major U.S. stock indexes opened slightly higher and then showed divergent trends. Chinese concept stock WeRide (stock code: WRD) surged again, reaching as high as $44 per share at one point, with an increase of nearly 40%. As of now, the company’s stock price has exceeded $40, and its market value has surpassed $11 billion.

As early as last Friday, WeRide had once surged by about 140% intraday with multiple trading halts before closing up by 83.46%. This means that in just two trading days, WeRide’s market value doubled.

Behind WeRide’s surge is recent filings submitted to the U.S. SEC by NVIDIA (stock code: “NVDA”), which show that as of December 31st, 2024, the company holds 1.7386 million American Depositary Shares (ADS) of WeRide worth $24.6528 million.

This investment was made in September 2017 when WeRide was not yet listed; it was known as JingChi Technology at that time and had just been established for a few months. It disclosed receiving a Pre-A round financing of $52 million led by Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance with follow-on investment from NVIDIA GPU Ventures.

At that time, NVIDIA only invested in two autonomous driving companies in China, besides JingChi Technology, there was also TuSimple which focuses on autonomous driving trucks. TuSimple has now been privatized and delisted, undergoing business transformation.

WeRide’s cooperation with NVIDIA goes beyond the capital level and is also reflected at the business level. WeRide provides more landing scenarios for NVIDIA’s chips and solutions. It is understood that WeRide’s new generation of autonomous driving solutions uses NVIDIA chips. As early as March last year, WeRide announced a strategic partnership with Lenovo Car Computing to jointly create an L4-level autonomous driving solution based on the NVIDIA DRIVE Thor platform AD1 ultra-high-performance domain controller.

Public information shows that WeRide was established in 2017 and has conducted research, testing, and operations of autonomous driving in 30 cities across 9 countries worldwide for nearly 1900 days. It is the only technology company with autonomous driving licenses in China, the United States, UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Singapore simultaneously.

SEE ALSO: WeRide Set to Launch Its New Generation of Robotaxi on October 15th

On October 25th last year, WeRide was officially listed on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange as the first global general-purpose autonomous driving company stock and also became the first global Robotaxi stock.

Since its establishment in 2017 until its listing last year, WeRide has completed ten rounds of financing successively. Investors include GAC Group (Guangzhou Automobile Group), NVIDIA，Bosch，IDG Capital，Qiming Venture Partners，and CoStone Capital among others totaling over $1 billion USD raised.

The surge in WeRide’s stock price in the capital market further boosted smart-driving concept stocks’ performance. Last Friday, Pony.ai (PONY) rose by 11.3%, while BYD (002594.SZ) which recently proposed “smart-driving equality”, saw a rise of 4.32% on February 14th setting a new historical high during trading hours.