Illustration of the China and U.S. flag on a central processing unit.
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Uncertainty — that was the theme during earnings season for the world’s biggest semiconductor firms which are unclear on demand for their products as a result of changing U.S. tariff policy and export restrictions that have been place on China.
Meanwhile, Washington last month added more semiconductor products from Nvidia and AMD to a list of items that are restricted for export to China, building on Biden-era curbs.
The changing tariff and China policy has caused consternation among executives at the world’s largest chip companies with visible impacts on their busiensses already.
AMD on Tuesday said that it expects $1.5 billion in lost revenue thorugh the end of its fiscal year as a result of AI chip export curbs to China, despite topping earnings estimates for the first quarter.
Super Micro issued disappointing guidance on Tuesday citing tariff and macroeconomic uncertainty. The company said it would not provide guidance for its fiscal year 2026 until “visibility” becomes clearer. The stock fell 4% in premarket trade.
And Marvell said on Tuesday that it is postponing its previously scheduled investor day from June 10 to a “future date in calendar 2026.” Shares of the firm fell 4.4% in premarket trade.
“We have decided to postpone our investor day given the current uncertain macroeconomic environment,” Matt Murphy, CEO of Marvell, said in a statement.
Clarity in ‘short supply’
Semiconductor stocks have been under pressure this year amid the growing macroeconomic uncertainty and trade policies from the U.S. There is also concern about the demand for AI products even as technology giants like Microsoft and Amazon continue to commit billions of dollars to build data centers.
And it’s not just U.S. companies that are feeling the heat. Samsung said last month that “demand volatiltiy is expected to be quite high” as a result of tariff policy changes and macroeconomic uncertainty.
“Due to the rapid changes in policies and geopolitical tensions among major countries, it’s difficult to accurately predict the business impact of tariffs and countermeasures,” a Samsung executive said on the earnings call.
“There are a lot of uncertainties ahead of us.”
Samsung is one of the world’s largest memory chipmakers.
“The semiconductor sector is grappling with a complex mix of demand signals and geopolitical headwinds,” Ben Barringer, global technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, told CNBC by email.
Barringer said that Marvell’s decision to postpone its investor day “adds a layer of uncertainty at a time when clarity is in short supply,” while Super Micro’s weak outlook also “raised eyebrows.”
“With macro uncertainty and export restrictions still looming large, the path ahead for chipmakers remains bumpy, even as underlying demand holds up in certain areas,” Barringer added.
Nvidia CEO: ‘Let us go race’
The U.S. chip industry has sought to show that it is leading in technology versus China and that it should be allowed to sell more product there.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC on Tuesday that China will likely be a $50 billion artificial intelligence market in two-to-three years.
“It would be a tremendous loss not to be able to address it as an American company. It’s going to bring back revenues, it’s going to bring back taxes, it’s going to create lots of jobs here in the United States,” Huang said.
For the last few years, Washington under both Biden and Trump, have looked to use export restrictions to restrict China’s access to American technology in areas such as AI and semiconductors. This has prompted Chinese firms to ramp up focus on homegrown technology with companies like Huawei looking to create viable competing products to the likes of Nvidia.
Nvidia’s Huang said there is competition in AI right now but American firms should be able to compete with China.
“The United States has to recognize that we are not the only country in that race, that we have competitors. We are confident people, we are a confident country we have confident companies, we are not afraid of a race. We look forward to a race. Just let us go race,” Huang told CNBC.
“And so I think that now is the time when the United States needs to realize that we need to put the pedal to the metal … we’ve just got to go for it. Waiting around, talking about it, trying to hold people back is not necessarily the best move. The best move is let American do American, let us go after it and win it.”
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.
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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.
Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.
The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.
The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.
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.