BB
NVDA
From car geek to robot whisperer
BlackBerry keeps trying to remind the market it is not, in fact, a smartphone nostalgia act. At Hannover Messe, the company’s QNX division said it’s expanding its partnership with NVIDIA to build next-gen safety-critical edge AI systems.
That sounds like a mouthful because it is. But the basic idea is pretty simple: QNX OS for Safety 8.0 is getting paired with NVIDIA’s IGX Thor platform and Halos Safety Stack so AI can run in places where mistakes are expensive — think robots, medical devices, and factory systems where “oops” is not an acceptable bug report.
Why investors should care
BlackBerry has been nudging QNX beyond its automotive roots for a while, and this deal is another breadcrumb on that trail. The company said about 20% of QNX revenue already comes from outside cars, and management still wants double-digit revenue growth in fiscal 2027.
A few things make this worth watching:
- It gives BlackBerry another credible growth story outside the auto cycle.
- It ties QNX more closely to NVIDIA, which is basically the cool kid in AI hardware right now.
- It reinforces the pitch that BlackBerry’s software is useful wherever real-time, safety-certified computing matters.
Big picture
The stock popping on momentum isn’t the whole story here, but it’s not random either. When a legacy name starts sounding more like an AI infrastructure play than a relic from 2009, the market tends to perk up. Big picture: BlackBerry is still trying to reinvent itself — and this partnership says the company wants to do it with robots, not ringtones.