In This Article:
Nvidia (NVDA) is reportedly planning to downgrade its H20 chip available for sale in China, according to Reuters, as a way to get around US curbs on global AI chip exports.
Cloudflare (NET) reaffirms its full-year outlook while seeing its revenue rise over 26% year-over-year in its first quarter earnings print.
Lastly, Affirm (AFRM) disappoints Wall Street on its latest guidance figure.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Catalysts here.
Now time for some of today's trending tickers. You can uh, we are watching this morning Nvidia, Cloud Flare, and Affirm. First up, Reuters is reporting Nvidia is planning to produce a downgraded version of its H20 chip for sale in China. Nvidia planning the new version to get around US curbs on chip exports to China. The company reportedly planning to launch the chip in July. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this week that China's AI market could be worth $50 billion dollars and it would be a big loss to lose access to it. I'm still here with Peter Chiar, my guest host for the hour. Peter, how are you thinking about Nvidia's movements here because it seems like any export control that's thrown at this company, they find a way to manage around it. What does that signal to you about the firm?
You know, I think they're doing a great job and you know, when I look at Trump and he analyzed he does value personal relationships. You see Jensen seems to be in DC a lot. He is trying to make this a personal relationship, which I think is the necessary thing. That's how Trump responds, how he deals with. We go back, one of our generals worked with Trump 1.1. Abe from Japan learned to play golf specifically so we could hang out with Trump and play golf with Trump and that actually worked very well for Japan back in the time. So I think he's taking all the right steps to navigate this as well as we can. And it is this trade off all the chip industry, like we need to sell products to China, but we also need to make sure that we bring and retain the superiority, particularly in AI here. So that's the balancing act. I think he so far is managing it fairly well recently.
All right. So learning to play golf still a good business investment moving forward here, Peter. Next up, we are going to talk about shares of Cloud Flare popping after the company reaffirmed its full-year forecast. In the first quarter, the software company reported a year over year sales increase of 26% and maintained its expectations for full year revenue growth of 25%. Their shares are up over 7% at the moment. What's interesting to me about this name, Peter, is that I continue to hear investors that I talk to talking about the importance of looking at software versus hardware amid the tariff-driven policy concerns. How are you thinking about that?
Yeah, we think, you know, AI is here, it's continuing to grow, but the big part is people are realizing AI is only as good as the data that you can feed it. So I think there's going to be a continued growth and how do we build up the data, how do we make sure this data is useful for AI. And it's kind of this, you know, interesting cycle. And what's been encouraging for me is over the last six months or so, you're hearing more companies talk about how AI has helped their business be more efficient. And that whole first wave, everyone just talked about the hyper scalers and it was the companies that were generating the AI product that were making all the money. Now, it does feel like you're starting to get some of those beneficiaries at the corporate level. So I think that continues that spend. So I think this continues to grow. It may be overbuilt here or there, but I think the trend is in a few years without a doubt, we will have more data, more software, more things being applied to that.
All right. Well, finally here, let's take a look at shares of Affirm falling after the company reported weaker than expected guidance. Shares falling despite Affirm adding 1.8 million customers in the quarter. The company also announcing a new partnership with Costco and an extension of its partnership with Shopify through 2028. But the shares are down 11%. That disappointing guidance really hurting the stock here. It also makes me wonder if there's a lesson about the health of the consumer right now, given Affirm is obviously attached to buy now pay later and there's questions to say the least about consumer.
Yeah, I think that it falls into that camp right now where you look at auto delinquencies, all these things are kind of increasing. You're looking at, I think you guys did a segment earlier, restaurant sales. There's all these signs that the consumer is tapped out a little bit and buy now pay later has been this phenomenal kind of relatively new invention. It's not very well regulated. It's not part of the banking system. So it's hard to tell what is out there, how the risks are and how the consumer's going to respond because I think it existed a little bit with COVID, but at that point the government was so quick to support the consumer with checks and low interest rates that I don't think anything got tested. So we might see this industry tested a little bit if the consumer slowdown is real.
That's a really great point to make sure that you're looking at names that didn't just survive because they got stimulus, make sure you're looking at some of those fundamentals in a world where we may not be getting any saving from the Fed or from from stimulus more broadly. Peter, thank you so much. Great insights as always. And for our audience, you can scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks with Yahoo Finances trending tickers page.