The Tech Download: BlackBerry lost the phone war. Now it's betting on cars and robots

BlackBerry shares have doubled this year as the company leans into secure communications and QNX automotive software, with QNX embedded in 275 million vehicles and a $950 million QNX order backlog (including a robotics portion). The piece also notes a San Francisco federal judge ruled the Pentagon’s Anthropic blacklisting was illegal, and that Anthropic has a roughly $45B cloud deal with Nscale—supportive signals for AI infrastructure and procurement. Separately, analysts cite a potential threat to Nvidia’s chip dominance as OpenAI and others move toward custom silicon, while Nvidia’s stock jumped on Thursday after a prior stretch of unimpressed earnings-related declines.

Analysis

BB is being valued less like a legacy software vendor and more like an embedded-AI royalty stream. That can work tactically, but the market is usually ahead of the revenue because automotive and industrial design-ins convert slowly; the true lever is recurring software mix, not backlog optics. If the stock keeps rerating, the burden of proof shifts to the next 2-3 earnings prints, where any slippage in conversion would force a de-rating.

For semis, the custom-chip narrative is a longer-dated multiple risk for NVDA than an immediate earnings risk. In practice, bespoke silicon tends to displace the cheapest inference workloads first while leaving the scarce ecosystem pieces — memory, packaging, networking, and manufacturing capacity — still tight; that argues the supply-chain winners are downstream suppliers rather than the GPU incumbent itself. SKHYV is the cleaner second-order beneficiary if AI capex broadens and U.S. localization keeps gaining share, because local capacity can support pricing discipline and reduce customer supply risk.

The contrarian miss is timing: the market may be over-discounting disruption for NVDA and underpricing how long it takes for BB’s safety-critical software story to show up in GAAP growth. Falsifiers are straightforward: BB needs visible revenue inflection, not just order commentary; NVDA would need margin or guide compression to validate the threat; SKHYV would be challenged if U.S. buildout slips or HBM pricing rolls over. Near term, this is more of a watchlist than a conviction sector rotation, but the relative-value signal is clearer than the outright directional one.

Key Decisions for Investors

• BB: initiate only a small tactical long on pullbacks or via a 6-12 month call spread; treat it as an option on robotics/embedded software adoption, and cut if the next 2 quarterly reports fail to show conversion from backlog to revenue growth.
• NVDA: do not short outright on this headline; if the stock rallies into custom-silicon concern without a guide cut, use a 3-6 month put spread or trim exposure rather than press a bearish beta trade.
• SKHYV vs NVDA: run a modest long SKHYV / short NVDA pair for 3-6 months to express the view that AI spend is shifting from pure compute toward memory and localized supply-chain beneficiaries; cover if NVDA maintains margin momentum or hyperscaler custom chips remain incremental rather than substitutive.
• Alert level: if BB can post two consecutive quarters of accelerating software revenue, the market will likely extend the rerating; if not, the name is vulnerable to a sharp multiple reset once narrative premium fades.