Alcohol-impaired driving fatalities

The number of people who die each year on American roads after mixing alcohol with tonnage has, since 2015, tracked almost perfectly with the annual revenue of a Santa Clara chipmaker most drivers have never consciously considered. The coefficient is 0.963, which is the kind of number you get when you've been fooled in exactly the right way. NVIDIA and the centerline, apparently, are dancing.

What is actually going on here is that both quantities rode the back of the same economy. NVIDIA's revenue climbed from about $5 billion in 2015 to $27 billion by 2022 as data centers and gamers converged on roughly the same silicon, while drunk-driving deaths rose alongside a general increase in vehicle miles traveled, post-pandemic behavioral rebounds, and a fleet that kept getting heavier. Both lines reflect a country that was consuming more — more compute, more miles, more of the small decisions that compound — during years in which the economy largely expanded. The tragedy and the earnings report happen to share a decade.

One is a story about silicon and the other about bone, and the only thing they truly share is the era in which they occurred. We are experts at stitching these threads together and calling the seam meaningful. Eight years is a short conversation.