A Chinese flag is displayed next to a “Made in China” sign seen on a printed circuit board with semiconductor chips, in this illustration picture taken February 17, 2023.
Florence Lo | Reuters
Major Asian chip stocks outside of China rose Tuesday, shrugging off a new round of U.S. semiconductor export curbs aimed at impairing Beijing’s capability to produce certain high-end chips.
Japanese technology conglomerate Softbank, which owns a stake in British chip designer Arm, saw its shares rise 3.6%.
The Biden administration’s latest chip curbs will also target sales of high-bandwidth memory chips, which could affect the world’s two largest memory chip makers — South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung.
Shares of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, however, rose 0.9% and 1.8%, respectively.
Derrick Irwin, portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia,” on Tuesday that the high-bandwidth memory controls would impact South Korean players to a degree.
“Although our belief is that the impact and sales of high bandwidth memory chips into China are reasonably small from these players in the scheme of things, and they’ll probably be able to shift that demand into the U.S. and other markets,” he said.
The Department of Commerce announced on Monday that it was curbing semiconductor exports to 140 new companies in its latest effort to limit China’s ability to access cutting edge chip technology that could be used for advancing its military capabilities.
Naura Technology Group, Piotech and ACM Research were among the largest Chinese companies to be included in the export controls list.
Shares of Naura Technology and ACM Research fell 3% and 1%, respectively, in China while Piotech rose 1%. China’s largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, fell 1.5% in Hong Kong.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said Monday that the new export controls were the “culmination of the Biden-Harris Administration’s targeted approach to impair the PRC’s ability to indigenize the production of advanced technologies that pose a risk to our national security.”
In addition to the entities added, the latest U.S. restrictions include new controls on 24 types of manufacturing equipment and three types of software tools used for developing semiconductors.
Last month, the effectiveness of U.S. chip restrictions had been thrown into question when it was reported that a chip made by TSMC had been found in a Huawei product.
The latest export restrictions include a new “red flag guidance” to address compliance concerns, and several “critical regulatory changes” to enhance the effectiveness of existing controls.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams speaks during the Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, on Nov. 8, 2018.
Pedro Fiúza | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Obvious Ventures, the venture capital firm co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has filed to raise $400 million for its latest fund, according to a regulatory filing.
The filing for Obvious Ventures V was made public with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday and indicates that it is an initial notice. The firm raised its most recent fund in 2022, when it brought in about $355 million, according to PitchBook data, short of its $400 million target.
A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment.
Launched in 2014, Obvious Ventures is widely known for its early investment in alternative meat startup Beyond Meat, holding a 9% stake at the time of the company’s initial public offering in 2019. It has been a tough run on the market for Beyond Meat, whose market cap is now below $300 million after peaking at more than $14 billion in the months that followed its market debut.
The venture market broadly has struggled in recent years, with tech IPOs largely drying up in 2022 and staying relatively dormant aside from a few notable deals each year. In the third quarter of 2024, exit value hit a five-quarter low, with “only two exits — both acquisitions — exceeding the billion-dollar threshold,” according to an October report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.
Read more CNBC tech news
Obvious Ventures says it aims to “support entrepreneurs building disruptive solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges,” with a focus on what it calls planetary health, human health and economic health. Well-known investments include supplements company Olly, lab-grown diamond maker Diamond Foundry and electric bus maker Proterra.
In its early years, Obvious Ventures had fun with numbers in its fundraising. For its first fund in 2015, the firm raised $123,456,789. Its second fund two years later raised the numeric palindrome, $191,919,191.
James Joaquin, who co-founded Obvious with Williams in 2014, said at the time of the second fund that the symbolism of the number was that you could look back at the first fund’s investments for an indication of what the firm would do in the future.
Joaquin, one of the firm’s managing directors, was previously CEO of Xoom, a payments service acquired by PayPal, and Ofoto, which was purchased by Kodak.
Williams, who helped create Twitter and was CEO of the company from 2008 to 2010, is still named as a co-founder of Obvious, but he isn’t a managing director. Williams wrote in a post on his publishing site Medium in 2017 that he was selling up to 30% of his Twitter holdings to finance other projects, including Obvious.
Late last year, Williams launched the app Mozi, which describes itself as a “private social network for seeing your people more” in real life.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holds a Blackwell GeForce RTX 50 Series GPU (L) and a RTX 5000 laptop as he delivers a keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 6, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
Nvidia reports fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday after the bell.
Here’s what Wall Street is expecting, according to LSEG consensus estimates:
EPS: $0.84, adjusted
Revenue: $38.04 billion
Nvidia’s earnings report on Wednesday will put the finishing touches on one of the most remarkable years from a large company ever. Not only do analysts expect a 72% increase in revenue in the quarter ended in January, but sales for the full fiscal year are expected to more than double to nearly $130 billion.
The company’s growth streak has been driven by the fact that its data center graphics processing units, or GPUs, are essential hardware for building and deploying artificial intelligence applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In the past two years, Nvidia stock has risen more than 440%, and it’s been the most valuable U.S. company at times with a market cap over $3 trillion.
But the stocks’ meteoric growth has slowed in recent months — it’s trading at the same price as it did last October. Slowing the company’s appreciation are questions from investors about what Nvidia does next, and if it can keep growing.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will get an opportunity on Wednesday to answer lingering questions from investors and analysts about what the AI boom looks like two years in.
In particular, Nvidia investors are worried about any signs that the company’s most important customers — hyperscale cloud companies — might be tightening their belts after years of big capital expenditures. They were also shaken by a Chinese AI model, DeepSeek’s R1, which challenged assumptions that more Nvidia chips would be needed to build smarter AI.
There’s also a possibility that attention on DeepSeek could prompt U.S. officials to further restrict Nvidia’s exports of AI chips to China on national security grounds. Nvidia is already barred from shipping its most advanced AI chips to the region, and it makes specially limited versions of its chips specifically for China.
Additionally, investors will want to know how the Blackwell rollout is going after reports that distribution of some versions of Nvidia’s latest AI chip may be happening slower than previously expected due to heating and yield challenges.
Morgan Stanley analysts estimated this month that Microsoft will account for nearly 35% of spending in 2025 on Blackwell, Google is at 32.2%, Oracle at 7.4% and Amazon at 6.2%.
Last week, TD Cowen analysts said they had learned that Microsoft had canceled leases with private data center operators and had slowed its process of negotiating to enter into new leases. The report raised fears about the sustainability of AI infrastructure growth, of which a large portion of spending is on Nvidia’s chips.
Microsoft pushed back Monday, saying it still planned to spend $80 billion on infrastructure in 2025. Plus, most of Nvidia’s other key customers touted large investments. Alphabet is targeting $75 billion in capital expenditures this year, Meta will spend as much as $65 billion and Amazon is aiming to spend $100 billion.
“We have talked to industry participants over the weekend, and while it’s certainly possible that there are longer lead time changes relating to land, the Microsoft GPU demand has not changed,” wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore in a note this week. He has a $152 price target on Nvidia stock.
Still, investors will be listening for any signs that Nvidia’s relationship with cloud companies remains strong. They’ll also be listening to Nvidia’s guidance for its fiscal 2026, and how much growth over last year’s elevated sales can be expected.
Shares of AppLovin tumbled 13% Wednesday as two short seller reports cast doubt on the integrity of the company’s artificial intelligence-powered AXON advertising software that helped drive the tech giant to become the top-performing tech stock of 2024.
Short seller Fuzzy Panda alleged that the AXON model was “the nexus of a House of Cards” built on fraudulent advertising tactics.
“We believe AppLovin has pulled every trick in the book,” the post stated. “We’ve been told they are stealing data from Meta in their e-commerce push. We also discovered AppLovin exploiting consumers and their data in ways which are clear violations of Google and Apple’s app store policies.”
The reports from Fuzzy Panda and Culper Research come following a stellar fourth-quarter earnings beat in February that kept Wall Street feeling bullish on AppLovin. CEO Adam Foroughi announced the company would spin off its mobile gaming segments and continue expanding the AXON model to other e-commerce sectors, such as health care, automotive and more. AppLovin’s advertising revenue climbed 73% in the quarter to reach almost $1 billion.
Read more CNBC tech news
“We believe AppLovin’s recent success in mobile gaming stems from the systematic exploitation of app permissions that enable advertisements themselves to force-feed silent, backdoor app installations directly onto users’ phones, with just a single click — an event that is often inadvertent thanks to the Company’s notorious UX gimmicks,” wrote analysts at Culper Research.
The Palo Alto-based company’s stock surged over 700% in 2024 and was the top performer in the sector, becoming one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom coupled with a growth in online advertising.
Fuzzy Panda confirmed to CNBC that the firm was still short on AppLovin. Culper Research, which shared some research with Fuzzy Panda per a letter from Culper Research founder Christian Lamarco, did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation at the time of publication.