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Charles Liang, CEO, Super Micro 

Source: Supermicro 

It’s been a brutal year for tech stocks. The Nasdaq is headed for its worst slump since 2008 and is poised to underperform the S&P 500 for a second straight year. Among mega-cap tech stocks, Amazon, Meta and Tesla have each lost at least half their value.

Investors looking for some sign of optimism can turn to a 29-year-old server maker located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Shares of Super Micro Computer have soared 89% in 2022, topping all other U.S. tech companies valued at $1 billion or more. Supermicro has a market cap of $4.4 billion, up from $2.4 billion at the start of the year.

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Supermicro manufactures computers and sells them to companies, which use them as servers for websites, data storage and applications like artificial intelligence algorithms. In the low-margin server business, Supermicro competes with Dell, IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise as well as lesser-known players such as China’s Inspur. According to estimates from The Next Platform, Supermicro had about 2.6% of the market in 2021.

Supermicro has sought to differentiate itself in the market by allowing customers to more easily customize their computers. That makes for a more profitable offering than off-the-shelf servers.

The strategy has been working. Supermicro reported 46% growth in its fiscal 2022, which ended in June, to $5.2 billion in revenue. Earnings per share climbed to $5.32 in 2022 from $2.09 in 2021 and $1.60 the year before that.

“The stock is actually just simply mirroring the EPS increases we have seen over two years,” said Nehal Chokshi, an analyst at Northland Capital Markets who recommends buying the stock. Chokshi has a price target of $165, by far the highest among five analysts tracked by FactSet.

Supermicro closed on Tuesday at $82.89.

Chokshi said that Supermicro’s profitability and growth have been strong enough that it might deserve a larger multiple. Yet even with this year’s rally, the stock is only trading at 8.6 times earnings over the next 12 months, which is lower than its five-year average of 9.5, according to FactSet. For the past 12 months, it trades at 10.1 times earnings, down from a five-year average of 17.8.

“There still hasn’t been multiple expansion,” Chokshi said. “A lot of investors, including myself, find that befuddling, because this is a name that has historically generated 20-plus percent revenue and EPS growth that’s trading only at 10 [times] earnings.”

Jim Cramer gives his take on Super Micro Computer

Across the board, investors have taken a hatchet to tech multiples, reflecting concerns that soaring inflation and rising interest rates will dampen enthusiasm for growth stocks for the foreseeable future. The Nasdaq currently trades for 26 times earnings, compared with its five-year average of 35, according to FactSet.

Supermicro shares started rising in July and continued going up in August, after the company’s annual earnings report. They soared another 30% in November, after Supermicro showed a nearly 80% increase in year-over-year sales for the September quarter to $1.85 billion.

Manufacturing servers involves putting many different parts together. Supermicro starts with one of its own motherboards, plugs in a processor from Intel or AMD, or a graphics processor from Nvidia, and adds a power supply, RAM, networking and whatever other parts the computer might need. Supermicro will sell the client the motherboard, a fully assembled server, or an entire rack of servers.

Heading into 2023, the outlook for the server market is murky, especially in the early part of the year. Companies are tightening their belts, and likely to spend less on capital expenditures. Supermicro’s revenue growth is expected to moderate to about 32% in fiscal 2023 and 9% the following year.

But the company has at least regained the support of Wall Street after a rough stretch in the middle of the last decade. From 2015 through 2017, Supermicro had misstated financial statements and published some key filings late, according to the SEC.

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“They have done a marvelous job of coming back,” said Susquehanna’s Mehdi Hosseini, who has a hold rating on the stock. “I would say they’re the comeback story of 2022. And that’s what’s reflected in the share price. But the management team has to remain very aggressive with their target.”

The comeback, according to Hosseini, is partially driven by confidence in CFO David Weigand, who has implemented strong internal financial controls since taking the job in early 2021.

“They became compliant with SEC filings in 2020, and it’s just been straight line up,” Hosseini said. “They have done really well.”

Bigger customers

Supermicro CEO Charles Liang told CNBC that the company’s recent performance reflects the size of the business and its ability to offer a wider array of products, particularly around customization.

While the company has been rapidly expanding in Taiwan, one component of its differentiation strategy, Liang said, is its San Jose, California, headquarters, where Supermicro still does the majority of its manufacturing.

Liang said it’s more expensive to build locally than overseas but doing so allows the company to be physically closer and more responsive to the chip companies it supplies as well as major customers like cloud providers and big websites.

“Silicon Valley enables us for better technology, faster time to market, and quick service, quick maintenance of our customer,” Liang said.

He said tech companies can move faster with Supermicro servers and are willing to pay for execution and the company’s design skills.

One area of notable growth is machine learning, or AI algorithms that require a large amount of computing power, usually centered around graphics processors made by Nvidia or AMD. Supermicro makes motherboards and systems that can combine up to eight GPUs together on a single board.

In the latest quarter, 45% of Supermicro’s revenue came from enterprise sales, including AI and machine learning products.

Another specialized market Supermicro is targeting is servers for 5G or telecom applications, using a new kind of approach called OpenRAN.

Supermicro is targeting $8 billion to $10 billion in revenue for fiscal 2024. To reach that goal, the company says it needs substantial growth from AI products and has to sell more complete systems, or servers already installed in a rack.

Current growth is being driven by Supermicro’s large data center business, which has been landing bigger accounts and comprised 50% of total sales in the September quarter, according to a November note from Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson, who has a neutral rating on the stock.

Supermicro said in November that a big unnamed customer was responsible for nearly 22% of the company’s sales in the quarter. In recent years, Supermicro had no single customer accounting for more than 10% of its sales.

‘Far more cautious’

Among analysts, there’s some skepticism that the company can hit its targets in a softer economic environment.

Susquehanna’s Hosseini said he recently downgraded the stock “because I think they will face headwinds in the next year” and the “growth targets are too aggressive.”

Intel and AMD have issued downbeat prospects for the server market, and companies of all sizes are cutting costs.

“While we applaud the quarter, we are far more cautious when thinking about Supermicro’s intermediate to longer term path and in particular view the company’s now stated goal of $8 billion to $10 billion in revenues in 2024 with trepidation given the headwinds noted above,” Wedbush’s Bryson wrote.

Analysts at Evercore said in a note this month that they expect server market revenue growth to slow to about 2.7% globally in 2023 from 13.5% last year. Server makers like Supermicro need to carry a lot of inventory and may face margin pressure if sales slow.

Northland’s Chokshi said that Supermicro’s strengths, especially in AI systems, could allow it to weather a market downturn better than its rivals.

“While their competitors are showing strong signs that there is a significant capex down cycle, their results are accelerating,” Chokshi said. “So far, they’re showing no signs of this cycle catching up to them.”

Liang is confident that Supermicro can continue to gain new customers, even if growth slows from its recent torrid pace.

“In a good year, growth will be around 80%,” he said. “In a bad year, hopefully 20%.”

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Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund closes $4.6 billion growth fund

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Peter Thiel's Founders Fund closes .6 billion growth fund

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.

Marco Bello | Getty Images

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm run by billionaire Peter Thiel, has closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The fund, Founders Fund Growth III, includes capital from 270 investors, the filing said. Thiel, Napoleon Ta and Trae Stephens are the three people named as directors. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Axios reported in December that Founders Fund was raising about $3 billion for the fund. The firm ended up raising more than that amount from outside investors as part of the total $4.6 billion pool, said the person, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

A Founders Fund spokesperson declined to comment.

Thiel, best known for co-founding PayPal before putting the first outside money in Facebook and for funding defense software vendor Palantir, started Founders Fund in 2005. In addition to Palantir, the firm’s top investments include Airbnb, Stripe, Affirm and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Founders Fund is also a key investor in Anduril, the defense tech company started by Palmer Luckey. CNBC reported in February that Anduril is in talks to raise funding at a $28 billion valuation.

Hefty amounts of private capital are likely to be needed for the foreseeable future as the IPO market remains virtually dormant. It was also dealt a significant blow last week after President Donald Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs roiled tech stocks. Companies including Klarna, StubHub and Chime delayed their plans to go public as the Nasdaq sank.

President Trump walked back some of the tariffs this week, announcing a 90-day pause for most new tariffs, excluding those imposed on China, while the administration negotiates with other countries. But the uncertainty of where levies will end up is a troubling recipe for risky bets like tech IPOs.

SpaceX, Stripe and Anduril are among the most high-profile venture-backed companies that are still private. Having access to a large pool of growth capital allows Founders Fund to continue investing in follow-on rounds that are off limits to many traditional venture firms.

Thiel was a major Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, but later had a falling out with the president and was largely on the sidelines in 2024 even as many of his tech peers rallied behind the Republican leader.

In June, Thiel said that even though he wasn’t providing money to the campaign for Trump, who was the Republican presumptive nominee at the time, he’d vote for him over Joe Biden, who had yet to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris.

“If you hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump,” Thiel said in an interview on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “I’m not going to give any money to his super PAC.”

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

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Meta adds former Trump advisor to its board

From left, U.S. President Donald Trump, Senator Dave McCormick, his wife Dina Powell McCormick and Elon Musk watch the men’s NCAA wrestling competition at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Meta on Friday announced that it was expanding its board of directors with two new members, including Dina Powell McCormick, a part of President Donald Trump’s first administration.

Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to Trump from 2017 to 2018. She is also married to Sen. Dave McCormick, a Republican from Pennsylvania who took office in January.

“He’s a good man,” Trump said of McCormick in an endorsement last year, according to the Associated Press. Powell McCormick and her husband were photographed in March beside Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a current advisor to the president, at a wrestling championship match in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Additionally, Powell McCormick was assistant Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice in President George W. Bush’s administration.

Besides her political background, Powell McCormick is vice chair, president and head of global client services at BDT & MSD Partners. That company was founded in 2023 when the merchant bank BDT combined with Michael Dell’s investment firm MSD. Powell McCormick arrived at the firm after 16 years at Goldman Sachs, where she had been a partner.

Her appointment represents another sign of Meta’s alignment with Republicans following Trump’s return to the White House.

In January, the company announced a shift away from fact-checking and said it was bringing Trump’s friend Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, onto the board. The changes follow Trump dubbing the company behind Facebook and Instagram “the enemy of the people” on CNBC last year.

Also on Friday, Meta said Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of payments startup Stripe, was also elected to the board. Stripe was valued at $65 billion in a tender offer last year.

“Patrick and Dina bring a lot of experience supporting businesses and entrepreneurs to our board,” Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Zuckerberg visited the White House last week, after attending Trump’s inauguration in Washington in January. Politico last week reported that the Meto CEO paid $23 million in cash for a mansion in the nation’s capital.

Powell McCormick and Collison officially become directors on April 15, Meta said.

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UnitedHealth is making struggling doctors repay loans issued after last year’s cyberattack

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UnitedHealth is making struggling doctors repay loans issued after last year's cyberattack

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 1, 2024.

Kent Nishimura | Getty Images

Following the massive cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare unit last year, the company launched a temporary funding assistance program to help medical practices with their short-term cash flow needs, offering no-interest loans with no added fees.

A little over a year later, UnitedHealth is aggressively going after borrowers, demanding they “immediately repay” their outstanding balances, according to documents viewed by CNBC and providers who received funding. Some groups have been asked to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days. 

Optum, UnitedHealth’s financial, pharmacy and care services arm, is telling borrowers that it reserves the right to “begin offsetting claims payable” to the practices, meaning the company will withhold separate funds until it recoups the loan.

It’s a significant change in posture for the company, which suffered a cyberattack in February 2024 that compromised data from around 190 million Americans, the largest reported health-care breach in U.S. history. The ensuing disruption caused severe fallout across the health-care system, leaving many providers temporarily unable to get paid for their services. Some dipped into their personal savings to keep their practices afloat.

During a Senate hearing about the attack in May, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said providers would only be required to repay the loans when “they, not me, but they confirm that their cash flow is normalized.”

Several doctors who took advantage of the financing told CNBC that they can’t meet the company’s new demands. Dr. Christine Meyer, an internist who started a practice in Exton, Pennsylvania, received a letter from Optum earlier this month telling her to immediately submit her organization’s payment. 

“We are not in any position to start repaying this loan,” Meyer, who started her practice about 20 years ago, told CNBC. She has been a vocal critic of UnitedHealth following the breach.

“I’m just looking at all my legal options at this point,” Meyer said. “But repaying them $750,000 in five days is obviously not going to happen.”

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UnitedHealth didn’t comment on specific cases, but a spokesperson for Change Healthcare confirmed that the company has started recouping the loans.

“Now, more than one year post the event and with services restored, we have begun the process of recouping the interest-free funding we provided to providers,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The company said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took the same approach last year “under its own cyber-attack lending program.” HHS launched a separate funding assistance program through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last March. CMS said it would automatically recoup payments from Medicare claims, and providers could accrue interest, according to a release.

We continue to work with providers on repayment and other options, and continue to reach out to those providers that have not been responsive to previous calls or email requests for more information,” the Change Healthcare spokesperson said.

Providers were told that UnitedHealth reserved the right to withhold future payments when they signed up for the funding assistance program, the company added. CNBC independently reviewed a copy of a loan agreement for the program and confirmed this statement.

Change Healthcare, which offers payment and revenue cycle management tools, was acquired by Optum in 2022.

After discovering the breach last year, UnitedHealth said it isolated and disconnected the impacted systems. The company paid out more than $9 billion to providers in 2024, and more than $4.5 billion has already been repaid, according to the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report in January. UnitedHealth said providers would receive an invoice once standard payment operations resumed, and that they would be subject to a repayment period of 45 business days. 

“Change Healthcare will notify the recipient that the funding amount is due after claims processing or payment processing services have resumed and payments impacted during the service disruption period are processed,” the website says. 

Dwindling deposits, lost revenue

While the vast majority of Change Healthcare’s services have been restored over the course of the last year, three products are still listed as “partial service available,” according to UnitedHealth’s cyberattack response website.

And doctors are still reeling. 

Meyer said that when the breach took place, she watched her practice’s daily deposits shrivel from the range of $60,000 to $80,000 to about $150 “overnight.” She applied for Optum’s temporary funding assistance program, and after some difficulty and back and forth with the company, she ultimately received a total of $756,900 in financial assistance.

Former Senator Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., shared Meyer’s story during the congressional hearing in May. He asked Witty about the company’s approach to the repayment process. 

“I’d like to absolutely confirm to you and Dr. Meyer that we have no intention of asking for loan repayment until after she determines that her business is back to normal,” Witty told lawmakers. “Even then, we would not look for repayment until 45 business days – 60 calendar days – after that and there would be no interest and no fee associated with that loan.”

“So it would be a determination she makes?” Casey asked.

“That’s absolutely right,” Witty said. 

Meyer said that’s not what happened. 

UnitedHealth Group Inc. headquarters stands in Minnetonka, Minnesota, U.S.

Mike Bradley | Bloomberg | Getty Images

She received a notice from Optum on Jan. 24, which was viewed by CNBC, that requested repayment since “the service disruption has ended for most clients.” Meyer said she called and told the company she was “not in any position to pay.” 

Meyer claims that her practice lost more than $1 million in revenue due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack. She told CNBC the figure was based on a forensic financial analysis her practice carried out by comparing its charges against payments over recent years. The $1.2 million figure accounts for losses across all its insurers, not just UnitedHealthcare, Meyer said.

On April 1, Meyer received another notice requesting immediate repayment within five business days. The letter was addressed to Meyer. But the name of the practice on the letter, Insight Counseling, as well as the total amount due, $925,200, were incorrect. 

Meyer said she called Optum again and was told the company made a mistake, but that she had five days to repay her actual total of $750,000. At that point, the company would start withholding her UnitedHealthcare payments, which she described as a “shakedown.”

Meyer said her practice typically receives annual claims payments of about $150,000 to $200,000 from UnitedHealthcare.

“I guess I’ll just let them take those payments back for the next three years until they get their money back,” she told CNBC.

In a post on LinkedIn on Thursday, Meyer wrote that she and her team “made a plan to leave the least amount of money in the account set up to receive payments from UnitedHealthcare. If it isn’t there, they can’t get it.”

‘Very frustrating experience’

Dr. Purvi Parikh, an allergist and immunologist with a private practice in New York, shared a similar story.

Parikh’s practice received about $440,000 in funding assistance after the breach. She said she started getting repayment notices late last year, and that Optum was threatening to offset claims payable to the practice.

“We were already hit very hard by the Change Healthcare hack,” Parikh said in an interview. “Now on top of that, they’re asking for all of this money back or they’re going to hold future payments ransom. It’s just been a very frustrating experience dealing with Optum.”

Parikh’s practice requested a one-month extension on its final payment of $101,650 in January to try and keep UnitedHealth from withholding other payments. In the email request, Parikh’s colleague wrote that “it has been quite difficult to recover financially.”

Optum granted Parikh’s practice the extension.

“People don’t just have that amount of money just sitting around,” Parikh said. “We’ve paid everything back, but it wasn’t without hardship.” 

A physician who runs a pediatric practice in New Jersey said UnitedHealth has already started withholding payments from the organization. The practice received more than $500,000 in funding assistance following the Change Healthcare breach. 

The doctor, who asked not to be named due to the sensitive nature of the situation, said the practice began receiving phone calls and emails from Optum requesting repayment beginning late last year. The group indicated that it didn’t have the money, but would set up a payment plan and had begun the process.

But the doctor said its billing department noticed that UnitedHealth had already started holding back claims payments. In its explanation of benefits, which details what an insurer will cover, the doctor said the company has a line that reads, “UnitedHealthcare is withholding payment for Optum.”

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