Nvidia dragged to worst day since March 2020 after Super Micro plunge

Nvidia’s shares plunged 10% on Friday, the company’s worst day since March 2020, when its market capitalization was one-twelfth of its current $1.9 trillion.

The stock drop was unrelated to any news from Nvidia. Super Micro Computer, a vendor of Nvidia-based servers, witnessed a 23% decrease in shares on Friday after breaking from its typical pattern of disclosing preliminary data and announcing earnings later this month.

Super Micro raised its sales and earnings expectations 11 days before reporting its second-quarter results in January. The corporation will release its fiscal third-quarter earnings on April 30.

Super Micro and Nvidia were the S&P 500’s two worst performers on Friday. Supermicro was introduced to the index in March.

Super Micro, like Nvidia, has recently seen a surge in sales due to insatiable demand for Nvidia-based computers used to develop artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT.

In addition to those two companies, investors reduced their holdings of many semiconductor equities ahead of earnings later this month.

On Friday, Arm shares slumped 17%, while the chip-focused VanEck Semiconductor Index dropped 4.5%. Arm sells intellectual property for semiconductors that is thought to be complimentary to Nvidia graphics processor-based artificial intelligence systems. AMD, Nvidia’s main GPU competitor, had a 5% share price decline.

Super Micro shares are still up roughly 151% this year, following a 246% increase in 2023. The stock’s decline on Friday was the worst since August 9, 2023, when it plunged 23.4%. Nvidia shares are up more than 58% in 2024.

Although Super Micro benefits from its partnership with Nvidia, the market remains competitive, with Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise preparing to develop systems using Nvidia’s newest Blackwell graphics processing units.