Tech stocks today: AI chipmaker Cerebras to stage blockbuster IPO, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang goes to China – Yahoo Finance

Reuters reports:

OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman will take the witness stand on Tuesday and Wednesday, the California court said, ‌in a clash of tech titans over Elon Musk’s lawsuit against ‌the company.

The trial, in its third week, may determine the future of OpenAI and its leadership, ​at a time when the company has raised hundreds of billions of dollars from large tech companies and investors, seeking to build out its computing power ahead of a potential trillion-dollar IPO.

Musk’s lawsuit alleges Altman and the AI startup persuaded ‌him into giving $38 million to ⁠nonprofit OpenAI, only for the organization to abandon its charitable mission to benefit humanity and instead become a for-profit corporation. ⁠OpenAI says Musk knew about the for-profit plan but wanted control.

The faceoff has generated interest throughout Silicon Valley and beyond, with testimony at times focusing on the ​personalities and ​leadership styles of the two men. Former ​OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever ‌testified on Monday that he spent about a year gathering evidence for the ChatGPT maker’s board that Altman had displayed a “consistent pattern of lying,” for instance.

Read more here.

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports:

Chinese tech stocks have rallied back to a key level, just as the headlines are heating up.

The Invesco China Technology ETF (CQQQ) is pressing into a long-term downward-sloping trend line that starts at its February 2021 peak and captures both the 2025 and 2026 highs.

The ETF is still down nearly 50% from that peak, but a break above the yellow trend line in the chart below would likely generate momentum for the bulls. Still, another technical hurdle looms just overhead: the $60 level around the 2025 high. A rally above that zone could force bearish bets to unwind, potentially leading to a short squeeze.

If the Invesco China Technology ETF rolls over instead, it has minor support near $50 and a slightly deeper support zone around $45.

Trump is set to visit China from Wednesday through Friday, with high-stakes talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping expected to focus on trade, AI, chips, and rare earths. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan also gives the setup a policy tailwind, with Beijing prioritizing tech self-sufficiency, AI, robotics, and advanced manufacturing as core growth drivers.

Read more here.

Nvidia (NVDA) stock jumped 2.8% on Monday, hitting an all-time high as chip stocks resumed their rally from Friday.

The world’s largest company had a market cap of $5.3 trillion. On Monday, Reuters reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ​is not joining President Trump’s trip ‌to China this week.

Several other chip stocks — Micron Technology (MU), Intel (INTC), and Qualcomm (QCOM) — opened at record highs this morning. Semiconductor names have been riding a momentum wave in recent sessions, as memory chips prove to be the latest catalyst in the artificial intelligence boom.

When President Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week in China, artificial intelligence will be a key agenda item.

My colleague Ben Werschkul reports:

Another key question: whether the US and China use this trip to launch official talks on AI guardrails, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, amid fears that AI could become an arms race in the digital era.

A top US technology official recently accused China of “industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI.” Trump officials reiterated over the weekend that this is an active area of concern, but it remains far from certain what the trip will yield.

The US official said AI would likely be a topic of discussion but that China’s record on cybersecurity broken promises means there’s “not a lot of confidence in anything that would be unenforceable and unverifiable.”

But any progress in this area, even the prosaic establishment of more formal communication channels, could be a significant development, the Brookings Institution recently noted.

“The United States and China hardly talk about AI, at least at the official level,” the analysis noted, calling any new communication channels “a crucial first step toward addressing an increasingly high-stakes issue.”

Read more here.

United Arab Emirates-based artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems is set to raise the size and price of its initial public offering amid hot demand for shares of the AI company, according to Reuters.

Reuters reports:

The ‌company is considering a new IPO price range of $150-$160 a share, up from $115-$125 a share, and raising the number of shares ​marketed to 30 million from 28 million, said the sources, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public yet.

At the top of the new range, Cerebras would raise roughly $4.8 billion, up from $3.5 billion under its original terms, though the figures remain subject to change before pricing, the people said.

The increase follows a broader ‌surge in AI adoption that has ⁠driven sharp demand for high-performance chips and turned semiconductors into a key bottleneck in the technology supply chain. Cerebras’ IPO has drawn orders for more than 20 ⁠times the number of shares available, the people said, as the chipmaker looks to manage surging interest ahead of its May 13 pricing.

Read more here.

The trial between Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) picks back up on Monday.

Musk is seeking damages and a reversal of OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit.

He contends that OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman duped him into donating millions of dollars to get the company off the ground with the understanding that it would remain a nonprofit. OpenAI, however, says Musk is angry that the company rejected his offer to merge it with Tesla (TSLA) and name him CEO of the new entity.

Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley recaps the biggest moments so far in the trial:

OpenAI filed court documents claiming that Musk tried to gauge Brockman’s interest in a settlement before the start of the trial. When Brockman suggested both sides drop their claims against each other, Musk allegedly told Brockman he would turn him and Altman into “the most hated men in America.”

The case will decide the future of OpenAI and whether it will continue to operate as a for-profit entity or revert to a nonprofit structure.

During his testimony this week, Brockman claimed Musk wanted to become CEO of OpenAI because he needed $80 billion to build a city on Mars.

Brockman also disclosed that he holds a roughly $30 billion stake in the AI company, as well as holdings in other Altman-backed companies.

Read more here.