Super Micro soars on heavy call volume as management trumpets its work with Taiwan to avoid chip smuggling into China #
Super Micro Computer is spiking on elevated call demand amid the company’s push to show it’s part of the chip-smuggling solution, rather than the problem.
Call volumes are running at 392,857 as of 12:16 p.m. ET, already well north of the 214,893 average over the past 20 sessions. The put/call ratio of 0.16 is also well below the 20-day average of 0.29, underscoring the bullish tilt in options.
This morning, management put out a statement saying that the company had “worked closely with Taiwanese authorities” to help prevent its servers (which contain Nvidia’s AI chips) from making their way into China in violation of export controls, and that this collaboration “resulted in the arrest of three suspects and the seizure of 50 servers that had been deceptively acquired after being sold by Supermicro to an authorized reseller.”
The company also aimed to emphasize that none of this was its fault.
“This case highlights the challenges that can arise when products are resold through multiple downstream parties beyond direct manufacturer control,” per the statement.
Back in March, Super Micro’s cofounder was among those charged by US prosecutors for allegedly attempting to sell $2.5 billion in servers with Nvidia GPUs to China. The stock had swooned on the news and lifted fellow server companies that weren’t tainted by this association. One analyst even suggested that Super Micro lost a billion-dollar contract with Oracle in part because of these allegations.
Shares have since recovered all those losses, and then some.
On the conference call following Super Micro’s big Q3 earnings beat, CEO Charles Liang said he didn’t “feel a negative feeling” from customers at the time despite these charges.
CFO David Weigand added that the company also hasn’t seen a decrease in its allocation of chips from Nvidia in the wake of this news.