Charles Liang, chief executive officer of Super Micro Computer Inc., during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday, June 5, 2024. The trade show runs through June 7.
Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Super Micro shares plunged 22% on Wednesday to their lowest level since May of last year after the embattled server maker issued disappointing unaudited financials and failed to provide specifics plans to keep its Nasdaq listing.
The stock dropped to $21.55 as of early afternoon and is now down 82% from its high in March, a selloff that’s wiped out about $57 billion of market cap.
Super Micro had its worst week on the market on record last week after the resignation of its auditor, Ernst & Young, the second accounting firm to bow out in under two years. The company faces accusations from an activist of accounting irregularities and that it’s shipped sensitive chips to sanctioned nations and companies, violating export controls.
Super Micro hasn’t filed audited financials since May and is at risk of being delisted by Nasdaq if it doesn’t report results for the latest fiscal year to the SEC by mid-November. The company said late Tuesday, in reporting preliminary results for the first fiscal quarter, that it doesn’t know when it will file annual financials.
On a call with analysts, the company said it wouldn’t discuss any questions related to Ernst & Young’s decision to resign and didn’t address corporate governance issues. CEO Charles Liang said Super Micro was actively in the process of hiring a new auditor.
Analysts at Mizuho suspended coverage of the stock on Wednesday “due to a lack of full financial detailed and audited statements.” Wedbush analysts, who have the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock, said the report left “more questions than answers.”
“Management seems fully focused on finding an auditor and resolving its late filing status,” the Wedbush analysts wrote. “However, we don’t know how significant the hurdles might be in achieving this goal.”
Liang said on the call that the company is “working with urgency to become current again with our financial reporting.”
For the quarter ending Sept. 30, Super Micro said it generated net sales of between $5.9 billion and $6 billion. That’s under analyst expectations of $6.45 billion, but is still up 181% on an annual basis. The company’s business has been booming of late because it ships servers packed with Nvidia’s processors for artificial intelligence.
NVIDIA founder, President and CEO Jensen Huang speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2024.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Super Micro shares soared 246% last year after jumping 87% in 2023. The stock peaked at $118.81 in March, shortly after being added to the S&P 500.
Liang said demand is strong for the latest Nvidia GPU, called Blackwell, which started shipping in recent weeks.
When asked by an analyst when Blackwell revenue might show up in Super Micro’s financials, Liang said that “we are asking Nvidia every day,” adding that the companies continue to work together closely.
“Our capacity is ready, but not enough new chips,” Liang said.
Analysts asked if the company’s plans for building Blackwell-based servers had changed, which could suggest that other server makers might receive additional capacity or allocations of Nvidia GPUs at Super Micro’s expense.
“To clarify one of the comments from earlier with respect to Nvidia, we have the deepest of relationships with Nvidia,” CFO David Weigand said. “Now we have multiple state-of-the art-projects in progress and we’ve spoken to Nvidia and they’ve confirmed they’ve made no changes to allocations. We maintain a strong relationship with them, and don’t expect that to change.”
Super Micro’s forecast for the December quarter was also below estimates. The company said revenue will be between $5.5 billion and $6.1 billion, trailing the $6.86 billion average analyst estimate, according to LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share will be 56 cents to 65 cents. Analysts were looking for EPS of 83 cents.
Super Micro said its board of directors had commissioned a special committee to look into Ernst & Young’s concerns. In a three-month investigation, the committee found there was “no evidence of fraud or misconduct” from management, the company said.
“The Committee is recommending a series of remedial measures for the Company to strengthen its internal governance and oversight functions, and the Committee expects to deliver the full report on the completed work this week or next,” Super Micro said, adding that it intends to take all steps to keep its listing on Nasdaq.
In just 17 days after launch, Temu surpassed Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Shein on the Apple App Store in the U.S., according to Apptopia data shared with CNBC.
Stefani Reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Chinese online retailer Temu, whose “Shop like a billionaire” marketing campaign made its way to last year’s Super Bowl, has dramatically slashed its online ad spending in the U.S. and seen its ranking in Apple’s App Store plunge following President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on trade partners.
Temu, which is owned by Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings, had been on an online advertising blitz in recent years in a bid to attract deal-hungry American shoppers to its site. With hefty spending on TV ads as well across Facebook, the company promoted clothing, jewelry, home goods and electronics at bargain basement prices.
The strategy was so effective that Temu topped Apple’s list of the most downloaded free apps in the U.S. for the past two years. Downloads of Temu on Apple’s App Store have fallen 62% in recent days, according to data from SimilarWeb, a digital data and analytics company. Ads for 50-cent eyebrow trimmers and $5 t-shirts that used to blanket Google search results and Facebook feeds have all but disappeared.
President Trump’s tariffs have upended Temu’s business model, along with its advertising strategy. Packages shipped from China are now subject to a tariff rate of 145%, while the de minimis provision, which allows shipments worth less than $800 to enter the country duty-free, is set to go away on May 2.
Temu and Shein, a fast-fashion marketplace with ties to China, plan to raise their prices in response to the tariffs. Both companies posted notices to their websites in recent days that warned they’ll be raising prices late next week.
“Due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs, our operating expenses have gone up,” Temu said on its site. “To keep offering the products you love without compromising on quality, we will be making price adjustments starting April 25, 2025.”
Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices as they reckon with higher costs from the tariffs. Many businesses on TikTok Shop, the social media app’s marketplace, also count on Chinese manufacturers for their items.
Amazon launched a competitor to Temu last November, called Amazon Haul, which features items under $20 that are largely from China.
Read more CNBC Amazon coverage
The Temu app is now No. 69 in a list of the top free apps in the U.S., after consistently ranking in the top 10, according to data from Sensor Tower. Shein is currently at 42, down from 15 last month. PDD’s shares that trade in the U.S. have plummeted 22% this month, compared to the Nasdaq’s 6% drop. Shein is privately held.
Rival Chinese retailers have subsequently risen to the top of the app store ranks, including Beijing-based wholesaler DHgate, which surged to the No. 2 top free iPhone app in the U.S., and Alibaba‘s Taobao, which ranked No. 7. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that viral videos promoting their cheap products have spurred the download frenzy.
A separate analysis by SimilarWeb showed Temu’s paid traffic, or search, display and social media advertising that drove visits to its website, has dropped 77% since April 11. Temu’s paid traffic previously outpaced nonpaid traffic to its website by 2 1/2 times, Ben Parkes, a consumer goods and retail analyst at Similarweb, said in an interview.
Marketing firm Tinuiti found that 20% of U.S. Google Shopping ad impressions were bought by Temu on April 5. A week later, that number had fallen to zero. By comparison, Shein’s impressions remained at 17% on April 12, while 60% of impressions were bought by Amazon.
Representatives from Temu and Shein didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Temu was previously one of Meta’s largest advertisers, but it appears to have dramatically scaled back its spending on the platform. As of Wednesday, Temu is running six ads across Meta platforms in the U.S., a review of Meta’s ad library shows. Temu is running approximately 27,000 ads across Meta sites and apps globally, particularly in Europe and the U.K.
That could be troublesome for Meta’s advertising business, which has gotten a significant boost from the discount retailer. Advertising analyst Brian Wieser at Madison and Wall estimated that more than $7 billion of Meta’s $132 billion in ad revenue in 2023 came from China. Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter results on April 30.
E-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukenas said he expects Temu to turn its ads back on in the U.S. at some point, but that the company appears to be shifting its dollars to other markets in the interim.
“It doesn’t mean Temu usage has dropped as significantly as the app did,” Kaziukenas said in an email. “But it means that new user acquisition is gone.”
The Spotify logo is displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 4, 2023.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Spotify was down Wednesday, with about 50,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector.
The company posted an all-clear to social media site X just after noon EDT, thanking listeners for their patience.
“Spotify experienced an outage today beginning around 6:20am EDT. As of 11:45am EDT, Spotify is back up and functioning normally,” the company said in a statement.
The music-streaming giant did not provide additional details about the scope of the outage.
Users peppered the replies to the company’s outage announcement with frustrations and memes.
“I’ll just hum to myself,” wrote user @alexissTyler.
Read more CNBC tech news
The company recently reported its first profitable year and said it paid a record $10 billion in royalties to the music industry.
Nearly 1,500 artists generated more than $1 million individually, according to Spotify’s annual Loud and Clear Report, and more than 80% of those in that pool did not have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 Chart.
The app has added new advertising features in recent months.
Earlier in April, the company released new generative artificial intelligence ads and reported that automated ad channels drove $2 billion in ad spending with digital audio since the beginning of the year.
Out of the company’s 675 million monthly active users, more than half are free users who are served ads when they stream music.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, attends the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, Feb. 10, 2025.
Benoit Tessier | Reuters
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices slid more than 5% on Wednesday after the company said it could incur charges of up to $800 million for exporting its MI308 products to China and other countries.
“The Company expects to apply for licenses but there is no assurance that licenses will be granted,” AMD said in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The new U.S. license requirement, which applies to exports of certain semiconductor products, would hit inventory, purchase commitments and related reserves, AMD said in the filing.
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AMD is one of the companies that builds the hardware behind the artificial intelligence boom. The company claims its AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators are “uniquely well-suited to power even the most demanding AI and HPC workloads,” according to its website.
It generated a “record” revenue of $25.8 billion in 2025, according to its February earnings release, but the new export restrictions could slow growth.
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AMD one month stock chart.
Nvidia, an AMD competitor, released a similar disclosure on Tuesday. The company said it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion for exporting H20 graphics processing units.
China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.
–CNBC’s Kif Leswing and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.