What Nvidia wants (but may not get) from the Supreme Court


Nvidia (NVDA) and Meta (META) are fighting two Supreme Court cases this year that they claim will flood the legal system with investor lawsuits if not decided in their favor.

So far, things aren’t exactly going their way.

Nvidia’s lawyers made their case before the high court on Wednesday and drew skepticism from justices across the ideological spectrum. The same happened to Meta’s lawyers last week.

“It just seems to me that you’re asking us to engage in a kind of analysis that we are not very good at,” Justice Elena Kagan, an appointee by Democratic President Barack Obama, told Nvidia’s lawyer Neal Kumar Katyal.

The outcome of the cases could undermine or embolden future securities fraud litigants.

Nvidia argues that investors who sued the company alleging that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made false statements should be required to present more particular information in their lawsuit about what Huang knew at the time of his statements.

The investors claim that in 2017 and 2018, Huang knowingly departed from Nvidia’s internal company data by misattributing the company’s demand for chips to the video gaming market.

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, (AP Photo/David Zalubowski) · ASSOCIATED PRESS

Demand at the time, the investors hypothesized, was actually driven by the more volatile market of cryptocurrency mining. That hypothesis relied on the opinion of a financial analyst who based his conclusion on publicly available documents, rather than Nvidia’s company documents.

“This is a highly technical subject, and I just don’t understand how a court is opposed to be evaluating that at the pleading stage,” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, told Nvidia’s lawyer.

The justices pressed Nvidia to explain why they should reverse a decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, repeating a point they made in the case against Meta’s Facebook argued last week.

In both cases, the appellate court allowed investors to proceed against the companies with proposed class-action securities fraud suits.

Yale Law School professor Jonathan Macey said he was surprised by the justices’ questions in the Facebook case.

“One thing that was amazing in the oral argument,” he said, “is you’ve got this kind of across-the-aisle alliance” with conservative Justice Clarence Thomas to liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressing concerns that were “very pro-plaintiff.”

Facebook, for its part, said investors should not be able to allege that it misled its stockholders by omitting that its partnership with British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica exposed the data of 87 million Facebook users.





Source link