Shares of Super Micro Computer (SMCI) rose as much as 29% in premarket trading Tuesday after the AI server maker late Monday filed a compliance plan with the SEC to avoid delisting from the Nasdaq list.
The company said its compliance plan shows it is on track to file delayed filings with the SEC “and catch up on its periodic reports within the discretionary period available to Nasdaq staff to grant them.”
Investors had eagerly awaited the filing following Barron’s report Friday after the bell, which stated Super Micro would file its plan to avoid delisting by Monday’s deadline under Nasdaq rules, citing people familiar with the matter. The stock was up about 16% during regular trading on Monday.
AI server maker and Nvidia customer (NVDA) also said Monday that the company hired a new auditor, BDO, after its previous accountant, EY, resigned at the end of October.
Even with this week’s rise, shares have fallen about 56% over the past three months. After gaining as much as 300% earlier this year, SMCI stock is now down more than 20% in 2024.
Super Micro has been grappling with the fallout from an August report by short-seller firm Hindenburg Research, which shed light on potential accounting misconduct, export control violations and murky relationships between top executives and partners at Super Micro.
Following the Hindenburg report, the company delayed its annual Form 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And last week, Super Micro also delayed filing its most recent quarterly 10-Q report with the SEC. To compound its problems, the company is being investigated by the Department of Justice. The barrage of bad news has sent stocks tumbling: EY’s resignation, in particular, sent Super Micro shares tumbling more than 30% in a single day in late October.
The company’s shares also fell sharply after Super Micro’s fiscal first-quarter earnings report on Nov. 5, which missed Wall Street expectations, sending the stock down 18% the day after the results.
On Monday, the company announced product updates during the Supercomputing Conference in Atlanta, including its next-generation AI servers that use Nvidia Blackwell chips.
“Supermicro has the experience, delivery speed and capacity to implement the world’s largest liquid-cooled AI data center projects, containing 100,000 GPUs, which Supermicro and NVIDIA recently contributed to and deployed,” said the CEO Charles Liang in a statement Monday.
“We now have solutions that use the NVIDIA Blackwell platform.”
