Pedestrian traffic fatalities

The quarterly earnings of NVIDIA have, between 2015 and 2022, risen in near-perfect parallel with the number of Americans struck and killed while walking down the street. The correlation is 0.981, a number so tight you can almost hear the spreadsheet whispering. No GPU has ever driven a pickup truck, though after eight years of this, one starts to feel less certain.

NVIDIA's annual revenue grew roughly five-fold over the period, from around $5 billion to $27 billion, as its silicon became foundational to gaming, crypto mining, and eventually the AI training workloads that would redefine the decade. US pedestrian fatalities, meanwhile, rose from about 5,500 in 2015 to over 7,500 in 2022, a brutal trend driven by heavier vehicles, taller front ends that hit pedestrians at torso height rather than the legs, distracted driving, and sidewalks that in many American cities were never really meant for walking. Both lines track the same era of consumption expansion, but the mechanism for each is entirely separate: one is a chip company riding compute demand, the other is a country with a dangerous relationship between its streets and its SUVs.

Two lines moving together for eight years can describe a market cap or a morgue ledger, and the only thing they share is the calendar. The chipmaker did not do this. The streets did.