Dutch chipmaker Nexperia has publicly called on its China unit to help restore supply chain operations, warning in an open letter that customers across industries are reporting “imminent production outages.”

Nexperia’s Dutch unit said Thursday that its open letter followed “repeated attempts to establish direct communication through conventional channels” but did not have “any meaningful response.”

The letter marks the latest twist in a long-running saga that has threatened global automotive supply chains and stoked a bitter battle between Amsterdam and Beijing over technology transfer.

“We welcomed the Chinese authorities’ commitment to facilitate the resumption of exports from Nexperia’s Chinese facility and that of our subcontractors, enabling the continued flow of our products to global markets,” Nexperia’s Dutch unit said in the letter.

“Nevertheless, customers across industries are still reporting imminent production stoppages. This situation cannot persist,” they added. The group called on the leadership of Nexperia’s entities in China to take steps to restore the established supply flows without delay.

Chinese company Wingtech, which owns Netherlands-based Nexperia, reportedly hit back on Friday morning. Wingtech accused the firm’s Dutch unit of seeking to strip the firm of its shareholder rights and pushing to establish a non-Chinese supply chain, Reuters reported. CNBC has also contacted Wingtech for comment.

Nexperia manufactures billions of so-called foundation chips — transistors, diodes and power management components — that are produced in Europe, assembled and tested in China, and then re-exported to customers in Europe and elsewhere.

The chips are relatively low-tech and inexpensive but are needed in almost every device that uses electricity. In cars, those chips are used to connect the battery to motors, for lights and sensors, for braking systems, airbag controllers, entertainment systems and electric windows.

In an apparent reprieve last week, however, the Dutch government said it had suspended its state intervention at Nexperia following talks with Chinese authorities. It was thought at the time that this could bring an end to the dispute and pave the way for a restoration of normal supply chains.

Rico Luman, senior sector economist for transport and logistics at Dutch bank ING, said it remains unclear how long the situation will last.

“The imposed measures to seize the Dutch Nexperia subsidiary have been lifted, but there are still talks ongoing about restoring the corporate structure and relation with parent company Wingtech,” Luman told CNBC by email.

“It’s not only about supplies of finished chips, it’s also about wafer supplies from Europe to the Chinese entity,” Luman said, adding that companies including Japan’s Nissan and German auto supplier Bosch are among the firms to have warned about looming shortages.

A spokesperson for the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), which represents Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz Group and BMW among hundreds of others, warned of elevated risks to supply, “particularly for the first quarter” of 2026.

“In recent weeks, the German automotive industry has largely been able to keep production stable through intensive efforts,” a VDA spokesperson told CNBC by email.

“However, the disruptions in the supply chain for Nexperia parts caused by political intervention have not been fundamentally resolved. Component availability remains uncertain,” they added.

ING’s Luman said the Nexperia situation is somewhat comparable to China’s rare earth export controls.

“The Chinese position appears strong again as European manufacturers are dependent on the supplies. And comparable to the rare earths, it’s not fully transparent which buyer is able to qualify for which chip supplies,” Luman said.

— CNBC’s Annika Kim Constantino contributed to this report.

The U.S. stock market was closed Thursday stateside for Thanksgiving Day and will reopen on Friday until 1 p.m. ET.

With approximately just 3 hours of trading left for the month, major U.S. indexes are looking to end November in the red, based on CNBC calculations.

As of Wednesday’s close, the S&P 500 was down 0.4% month to date, the Dow Jones Industrial Average 0.29% lower during the same period and the Nasdaq Composite retreating 2.15%, vastly underperforming its siblings as technology stocks stumbled in November.

Unless there’s a huge jump in stocks during the shortened trading session on Friday stateside — which might not be an unequivocally positive move since it would raise more questions about the market’s sustainability — that means the indexes are on track to snap their winning streaks. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average have risen in the past six months, and the Nasdaq Composite seven.

It will also mark a divergence from the historical norm. The S&P 500 has advanced an average of 1.8% in November since 1950, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac. And in the year following a U.S. presidential election, it typically rises 1.6%.

But it’s not been a typical post-presidential election year. It’s hard to see the market, in the coming months, or even years, moving according to any historical trajectory.

U.S. futures are mostly flat Thursday night. The stock market was closed during the day for Thanksgiving in the U.S. Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed Friday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 ticked up in volatile trading after Tokyo inflation came in hotter than expected.

Trump to suspend migration from ‘Third World Countries.’ The U.S. president will also cancel federal benefits and subsidies to “noncitizens” in the country, he said in Truth Social posts on Thursday night stateside. Trump did not specify which countries would be affected.

South Korea imposes sanctions on Prince Group. The Cambodian conglomerate is accused of running large-scale fraud operations across Southeast Asia. The U.S., U.K. and Singapore have also imposed punitive measures on the company.

Russia is ready for ‘serious’ discussions for peace. The U.S.-led framework “can be the basis for future agreements,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, as translated by Reuters. He added that the U.S. seemed to take Moscow’s position “into account.”

[PRO] Bank of America doesn’t see much upside for 2026. The S&P 500 should rise by a single-digit percentage point, a slowdown from recent years because one supporting factor will be shrinking, said a strategist from the bank.

Europe’s slow and steady approach to AI could be its edge

It’s unlikely that Europe will lead in building facilities for AI hyperscalers or for the training of AI — that race is considered all but won — but the general consensus is that it could excel in smaller, cloud-focused and connectivity-style facilities.

Europe has “a lot of constraints, but, actually, the more difficult something is to replicate, the more long-term value what you’ve got has,” said Seb Dooley, senior fund manager at Principal Asset Management.

— Tasmin Lockwood

Tech giant Baidu is emerging as one of China’s key artificial intelligence chip players, positioning itself as a challenger to Huawei as both look to fill the void left by industry leader Nvidia being kept out of the country.

Best-known as China’s biggest search business, Baidu has in recent years refocused its business around driverless cars and AI, including a majority-owned subsidiary, Kunlunxin, which designs chips.

Several analysts have upgraded their outlook on Baidu’s stock over the past few weeks, citing the semiconductor business and forecasting the unit will gain more domestic orders.

This month, Baidu laid out a five-year roadmap for its Kunlun AI chips, beginning with the M100 in 2026 and the M300 in 2027. The company already uses a mix of its self-developed chips in its data centers to run its ERNIE AI models, as well as Nvidia products.

Baidu makes money by selling its chips to third parties building data centers as well as renting out computing capacity via its cloud. It has sought to position itself as a so-called “full stack” AI offering with infrastructure made up of chips, servers and data centers, as well as AI models and applications.

And the chip business appears to be gaining traction. Earlier this year, Kunlunxin won orders from suppliers to China Mobile, one of the country’s biggest mobile carriers.

“Kunlunxin has emerged as a leading domestic AI chip developer, focusing on high- performance AI chips for large language model (LLM) training and inference, cloud  computing, and telecom and enterprise workloads,” analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a note this month.

While Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are widely regarded as the most advanced chips for training and running AI, the company has been blocked by the U.S. government from selling its top-end product to China. Beijing has also reportedly been persuading local tech companies not to buy the H20, a less powerful Nvidia chip designed for the Chinese market and greenlit for export.

With Huawei — the leading player through its massive clusters of chips — out of the picture, analysts are suggesting Baidu will fill the void and its chip business is set for explosive growth.

“We believe domestic demand for AI compute in China remains intense, and hyperscalers are increasingly sourcing from local solution providers,” JPMorgan said in a note on Sunday. “We view Kunlun AI chip as one of the best positioned.”

The investment bank analysts forecast Baidu chips sales to increase six-fold to reach 8 billion Chinese yuan ($1.1 billion) in 2026.

Analysts at Macquarie estimate that Baidu’s Kunlun chip unit could be valued at about $28 billion.

Baidu is not alone among China’s tech giants when it comes to self-developed semiconductors. CNBC reported in August that Alibaba is also developing its next-generation AI chip.

Tencent said this month that its 2025 capital expenditure would be lower than initially anticipated. But Tencent President Martin Lau said this this was not because of a lack of demand, but more a shortage of available chips to spend the money on.

“It is not a reflection of our change in AI strategy … It is indeed a change in terms of the AI chip availability,” Lau said.

Part of this shortage has been driven by global demand and resulting bottlenecks in the semiconductor supply chain. But China’s effective block of Nvidia chips has also reduced the supply.

Chinese tech firms have tried to mitigate the shortage by using stockpiled chips, as well as trying to make their AI models more efficient to do more with the semiconductors they have.

Meanwhile, China has its own challenges with manufacturing because its biggest chipmaker SMIC, is unable to compete on the scale and technology with leaders like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. That makes it hard for the China to manufacture enough domestic chips to fill the shortfall.

Like their U.S. counterparts, Chinese tech companies have continually reported strong demand for AI.

“We see that customer demand for AI is and remains very strong. In fact, we are not even able to keep pace with the growth in customer demand … in terms of the pace at which we can deploy new servers,” Alibaba’s Wu said this week.

That gives Baidu an opportunity in China.

“Baidu’s chip push is both a necessity and an opportunity. It’s a necessity, because Chinese platforms can no longer assume a steady diet of US GPUs; opportunity, because there’s now a semi‑captive, multi‑billion‑dollar domestic market for AI hardware that is compliant with both US export rules and Beijing’s self‑reliance agenda,” Nick Patience, practice lead for AI at The Futurum Group, told CNBC.

“If Baidu can ship competitive Kunlun generations on time, it doesn’t just solve its own supply problem — it becomes a strategic supplier to the rest of China’s AI industry.”