Charles Liang, CEO of Super Micro, speaks at the HumanX AI conference at in Las Vegas on March 10, 2025.
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Super Micro issued disappointing guidance on Tuesday, a week after the server maker provided preliminary results for the latest quarter that fell far shy of Wall Street’s expectations. The stock slid about 4% in extended trading.
Here’s what the company reported in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: 31 cents adjusted vs. 50 cents expected
Revenue: $4.60 billion vs. $5.42 billion expected
While the latest numbers were below analysts’ estimates, they were in line with early results that Super Micro disclosed last week. The company said at the time that revenue in the fiscal third quarter would be between $4.5 billion and $4.6 billion, and that earnings per share would fall in the range of 29 cents to 31 cents. The stock plummeted 12% following that release.
But Super Micro on Tuesday gave investors their first glimpse into fourth-quarter results, and those are also below expectations. Super Micro called for 40 cents to 50 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $5.6 billion to $6.4 billion in revenue. Analysts polled by LSEG had been looking for 69 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $6.82 billion in revenue.
The macroeconomic environment is likely to weigh on performance, the company said, following President Donald Trump’s announcement in early April of sweeping new tariffs on imported goods. CEO Charles Liang also said that some customers delayed purchases of data center technology in the latest quarter.
“We do expect many of those commitments to land in the June and September quarters, reinforcing my confidence in our ability to meet our long-term targets,” Liang said in the release. He added that “economic uncertainty and tariff impacts may have a short-term impact.”
Super Micro’s revenue grew 19% year over year during the quarter, which ended on March 31. Net income of 17 cents per share were down from 66 cents in the same quarter a year ago.
It’s been a treacherous past year for Super Micro. Prior to that, the stock had been on a tear due to the company’s position in the artificial intelligence market, selling servers packed with Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Over the summer, short seller Hindenburg Research issued a report on the Super Micro, claiming it had found proof of “accounting manipulation.” In October, Ernst & Young resigned as the company’s auditor after raising concerns about internal control over financial reporting and other matters.
An independent special committee investigated but “did not raise any substantial concerns about the integrity of Super Micro’s senior management or Audit Committee, or their commitment to ensuring that the Company’s financial statements are materially accurate,” according to a statement.
In February, Super Micro filed an annual report for its 2024 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, helping to keep the stock from being delisted on Nasdaq. Staff from the exchange had informed Super Micro that the company was back in compliance with filing requirements, according to a statement.
As of Tuesday’s closing bell, Super Micro had gained 9% so far in 2025, while the S&P 500 index had declined by 4%.
Executives will discuss the results on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.
Oracle stock slipped 5% on Tuesday after a report from The Information that raised questions about the company’s plans to buy billions of Nvidia chips to rent as a cloud provider to clients like OpenAI.
Oracle had 14% gross margins on $900 million in sales in its Nvidia cloud business in the three months ending in August, according to the report, which cited internal documents. That’s significantly lower than Oracle’s overall gross margin of around 70%.
The report said that Oracle’s recent transformation into one of the most important cloud and artificial intelligence companies may run into profitability challenges because of how expensive Nvidia chips are and aggressive pricing on its AI chip rentals.
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In September, Oracle said that its backlog of cloud contracts, which it called remaining performance obligations, had jumped 359% in a year. It forecasted $144 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in 2030, up from just over $10 billion in 2025.