Rivian shares soared by over 18% on Friday’s first trading hour, touching $19.39 and marking the stock’s highest level in nearly two years.
The sharp rebound comes just one day after shares tumbled 6.1% following the AI and Autonomy Day, where the EV maker revealed its own proprietary processor, is integrating LiDAR, and the new Autonomy+ software to rival Tesla’s (Supervised) FSD.
The new in-house developed processor allows the company to eliminate its dependence on Nvidia chips for some of its models while simultaneously improving margins.
“Today was an incredibly exciting day for us,” Rivian’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Newsweek immediately after the event.
“It was the result of years of time to come together, working on developing hardware platforms, our perception platform, building a large foundation model to control how the vehicles are operated,” Scaringe added.
As of press time, Rivian was trading at $19.39, up from an opening price of $16.82.
Over the first 45 minutes of Friday’s session, more than 34 million shares have traded hands, well above average trading activity. The surge pushed the company’s market capitalization to $23.60 billion.
Stock Performance
Friday’s rally extends what has been a remarkable turnaround for Rivian shares, which hit a 52-week low of $10.36 last April.
The stock has now gained 42% over three months, and nearly 44% year to date.
However, shares remain roughly 89% below the post-IPO peak of $179.47 reached in November 2021.
The company went public — a few months after the other US EV maker Lucid merged with a SPAC — in one of the largest US listings of that year.
Rivian is expected to report its fourth quarter production and delivery figures in the first week of January 2026 with the financial results following in February.
Needham analyst Chris Pierce responded earlier this Friday to the AI Day presentation by raising his price target on Rivian to $23.00 from $14.00 — a 64% increase — while reiterating his Buy rating on the stock.
VW Partnership Boundaries
Scaringe clarified that the newly revealed autonomous driving technology is not part of Rivian’s $5.8 billion technology partnership with Volkswagen Group, addressing investor questions about potential intellectual property overlap.
“The Volkswagen deal is only for the zonal control and the real-time operating systems along with the infotainment platform, and not the UI, none of the AI that’s embedded into UI — that’s Rivian, in the same way the self-driving platforms developed, are not part of the joint venture,” Scaringe explained on Thursday.
When asked whether the autonomous technology could eventually be licensed to the German automaker, Scaringe left the door open.
“Now, could those become part of a separate deal with Volkswagen? Perhaps, but that’s not what’s in our current deal with Volkswagen,” he said.
