AI Daily: Nvidia races to get AI chips out of U.S. ahead of new rule

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

CHIP EXPORT RULE: Trump officials are considering removing a Biden-era rule that divides the world into tiers that help determine how many AI chips a country can obtain, Reuters’ Karen Freifeld reports. Three sources familiar with the matter say that plans are still under discussion and have warned them they could change. Officials are considering replacing the tiers with government-to-government agreements, Freifeld writes.

Publicly traded companies in the space include AMD (AMD), Intel (INTC), Marvell (MRVL), Microchip (MCHP), Micron (MU), Nvidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM) and Texas Instruments (TXN). 

SHIP CHIPS: Nvidia and cloud providers such as Oracle (ORCL) are rushing to ship chips and servers to data centers outside the U.S., ahead of a mid-May deadline when a controversial new regulation is scheduled to take effect that will cap their abilities to add new computing capacity in other countries, The Information’s Anissa Gardizy and Qianer Liu report. 

CHINA NOT BEHIND: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday that China is “not behind” in artificial intelligence, and that Huawei is “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world,” CNBC’s Kif Leswing reports. Speaking to reporters at a tech conference in Washington, D.C., Huang said China may be “right behind” the U.S. for now, but it’s a narrow gap. “We are very close,” he said. “Remember this is a long-time, infinite race.”

GUIDANCE CUT: Super Micro (SMCI) has lowered its Q3 adjusted EPS view to 29c-31c from 46c-62c, and Q3 revenue view to $4.5B-$4.6B from $5B-$6B. When issuing preliminary financial results for its fiscal Q3, the former AI darling said that while the new generation product design wins “are robust,” during Q3 “some delayed customer platform decisions moved sales into Q4.” It added, “The GAAP and Non-GAAP gross margin for Q3 was 220 basis points lower than Q2 primarily due to higher inventory reserves resulting from older generation products and expedite costs to enable time-to-market for new products.”