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Luke Kawa5/6/25

Super Micro sinks after issuing disappointing financials for the second time in eight days

Super Micro Computer is sinking again, down 6% in after-hours trading.

Last week, the AI server company gave investors a heads-up that its upcoming earnings would disappoint by issuing a preliminary set of results that were downright ugly, and the stock tumbled double digits the next session.

Management explained away the big miss as a timing issue, saying, “During Q3 [that is, the three months ending March 31] some delayed customer platform decisions moved sales into Q4.”

In other words, customers wanted servers with the new Blackwell GPUs, not older products like the Hopper.

That reasoning rings a bit hollow now, with the company indicating that its current quarter will also be weaker than Wall Street anticipated.

For the three months ending June 30, management expects sales between $5.6 billion and $6.4 billion on diluted earnings per share between $0.40 and $0.50. The midpoint of those ranges falls far below what analysts had been looking for: $0.64 in earnings per share on revenues of nearly $6.6 billion.

During the conference call that followed the release of these results, CFO David Weigand tacked on “and later” to their prior statement related to the timing of sales.

One wonders how the extra week helped Super Micro learn (or decide to tell investors) that these sales wouldn’t be made up in a timely fashion.

“September will be even stronger” than the June quarter, according to CEO Charles Liang, who said the firm “remained confident” in its $40 billion revenue target for fiscal 2026 (July 2025 through June 2026).

One also wonders how much faith investors can have in Super Micro’s guidance — relating to the short and long term — after being disappointed twice in a little over a week.

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Tasha Matsumoto

Large-caps waver ahead of next week’s Fed meeting; small-caps notch record close

Stocks are in a holding pattern as investors await tomorrow’s release of September PCE for further insight into next week’s Fed decision.

a sunny field

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Report: US senators plan to introduce bill blocking Nvidia from selling advanced chips to China for 30 months

US senators are on the verge of introducing a bill that would block Nvidia from selling its H200 or Blackwell chips to China for 30 months, the Financial Times reports. The H200 is Nvidia’s best chip from the Hopper generation, while the Blackwell line is its current flagship offering.

Shares of the chip designer are little changed in the wake of this report, still up more than 1% on the session. The reaction makes sense, seeing as previous positive indications on Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced chips to China failed to inspire much positive momentum in its shares.

The stock got a short-lived jolt higher (that didn’t last the day!) on November 21 after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had discussed the possibility of selling its H200 chips to China.

Nvidia has effectively been shut out of China’s AI market in 2025. First, export restrictions meant it could no longer sell the H20, a nerfed version of its Hopper chip, to the world’s second-largest economy. After that export ban was lifted, demand from China “never materialized,” per Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Reports indicate that China banned its leading technology giants from purchasing these semiconductors, instead pushing them toward domestic alternatives.

President Donald Trump had mused about allowing Nvidia to sell Blackwell chips to China prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi in late October, but failed to do so. The two leaders did not discuss the topic at that time.

Per the FT, this upcoming bill would be a bipartisan effort, being cosponsored by the leading Republican and Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia subcommittee.

markets

AI energy plays soar on an explosion of call buying

Like their quantum computing counterparts, AI-linked energy plays are benefiting from an explosion of bullish options activity on Thursday.

Oklo is up double digits with call volumes above 106,000 as of 2:46 p.m. ET, more than double its 20-day average for a full session, with a put/call ratio of about 0.6. Call options with a strike price of $110 that expire this Friday (which are now in-the-money thanks to today’s surge) are seeing the most activity.
Nuscale, another nuclear energy play, has seen nearly 140,000 call options change hands versus a 20-day average of 51,073.
And fuel cell company Bloom Energy has traded nearly 80,000 calls, roughly twice its 20-day average, with a put/call ratio of about 0.3.

During his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast released on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up the potential for nuclear energy, saying, “In the next six to seven years I think you are going to see a whole bunch of small nuclear reactors.”

This adds to the evidence that the speculative bid is back in a big way after smaller stocks tied to the AI boom and quantum computing cratered from mid-October through most of November as credit risk began to seep into the AI trade.

Old electronic items tossed on ground for disposal, Hudson

Technology giants don’t look like they used to, as the asset-light era fades

Oracle and Meta are now some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the S&P 500, spending more than energy giants. I guess data really is the new oil?

David Crowther10h

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Matt Phillips10h

Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

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