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Luke Kawa8/12/25

Nvidia whipsawed by report that China’s internet regulator barred companies from ordering its chips

Plot twist!

Nvidia briefly erased all of its premarket gains of 1% after The Information reported that China’s internet regulator has “ordered local tech companies including ByteDance, Alibaba Group, and Tencent Holdings to suspend their purchases of Nvidia chips, citing data security concerns with the chips, according to three people briefed on the matter.”

Per The Information, this decision was made shortly after reports surfaced that Nvidia would be allowed to sell its H20 chips to China once again.

Chinese demand for these processors had reportedly been white-hot, with Reuters saying that Nvidia quickly reversed plans to sell down just its existing inventory and instead ordered an additional 300,000 chips from TSMC.

I’m so old, I remember when US national security concerns were the reason these chips couldn’t be sent to China. That is, I was born before mid-April 2025, when those export restrictions were put in place.

Nvidia recently reached an agreement with the US government to receive export licenses for the H20 in exchange for providing 15% of revenues generated from their sale to the US government.

The chip designer’s calendar 2025 sales estimates hadn’t been rising too briskly following reports that it regained access to what CEO Jensen Huang called a $50 billion AI data center market, suggesting that analysts had been slow to incorporate any potential top-line boost into their forecasts just yet.

Nvidia took a $4.5 billion impairment charge in its Q1 earnings report related to this loss of its China business, and said that its Q2 revenue forecast would have been $8 billion higher if not for the export curbs.

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AMD to “effectively guarantee” a loan to AI startup Crusoe that will be used to purchase its chips, The Information reports

Advanced Micro Devices will “effectively guarantee” a $300 million loan to data center company Crusoe from Goldman Sachs, according to The Information.

That is, Crusoe is taking out a loan to purchase AMD’s chips, and the chips that it’s purchasing are being used as collateral for that loan.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this sounds an awful lot like a very common form of borrowing done by American families: borrowing money to buy a house, and having the home be collateral for the mortgage.

One big difference, of course, is that your home is expected to appreciate in value, while AI chips are expected to depreciate in value as they’re used. (The silver lining, however, is that so far these processors haven’t lost value too quickly.)

Another difference is that AMD, per the report, has agreed to rent these chips from Crusoe if it can’t find customers for this compute, which helped reduced the interest rate Crusoe will pay on this loan.

Similarly, in September, Nvidia agreed to buy any of CoreWeave’s unused cloud computing capacity through April 13, 2032, for $6.3 billion.

Rather than get overly hung up on “circular financing” elements, I’d probably frame the issue here like this: everyone wants AI chips. AMD sells AI chips. And yet, in both this deal and the most high-profile one we know about (AMD’s pact with OpenAI), the chip designer seems to be having to go the extra mile to get companies to use its AI chips. You might recall that as part of the OpenAI agreement, AMD issued warrants that enable the ChatGPT developer to receive 160 million shares, or about 10% of the company, if certain operational and stock price targets are hit over time.

Why is it so tough to get buyers on normal terms? My guess would be that this either says something negative about the financing environment for AI startups or the perception of AMD’s AI chips.

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Max Knoblauch17h

Rental car companies drop amid volatile demand following an “unacceptable” Q4 from Avis

Rental car company Avis shed roughly $1 billion in market cap on Thursday as its stock fell more than 23% following the company’s Q4 results, which CEO Brian Choi called “unacceptable.”

Avis’ adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization came in at $5 million on the quarter, a massive miss compared to the $145.4 million expected by Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet.

Avis said commercial rental days fell 11% in November, as thousands of flights were canceled amid the government shutdown. That led Avis to reduce its fleet size in Q4, “the most difficult period to sell used vehicles.” The company also took a $500 million write-down on its EV fleet at year-end.

“When operational performance speaks for itself, we earn the right to focus on the bigger picture. This quarter, we didn’t earn that right. We fell significantly short of guidance. That’s unacceptable, and I have no excuses to offer,” Choi said on the company’s earnings call.

Avis said it expects lower earnings in the first quarter of 2026, as January was also impacted by weather-related flight cancellations. Rival Hertz was dragged down in the sell-off, dropping more than 14%.

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