US Supreme Court grants bail in NVIDIA case, allowing shareholder lawsuit to proceed

The US Supreme Court dismissed as “imprudently granted” an NVIDIA case it had previously agreed to hear. In other words: “Oops, we never should have taken that.” The decision allows the majority of the lawsuit filed by shareholders against the chip maker to proceed.

An investment firm and a pension fund filed a lawsuit against NVIDIA, claiming the company misled investors about its reliance on the crypto mining industry. The lawsuit alleges that NVIDIA concealed its dependence on the market before a crash in 2018 that sank the chipmaker’s stock prices. (For better or for worse, the cryptocurrency has been recovering, with Bitcoin recently breaking $100,000 for the first time.)

The court’s unanimous dismissal reflected its apparent reluctance to hear the complex technical details of the case. “The writ of certiorari is dismissed as being granted intentionally,” the decision simply states. That language was identical to a remarkably similar dismissal in a case SCOTUS heard against Meta last month, in which Meta was also accused of deceiving investors.

The Washington Post reports that the justices made references to NVIDIA’s dismissal when hearing arguments in mid-November. “It is becoming less and less clear why we took this case … and … why you should win it,” Judge Elena Kagan reportedly said. The New York Times says court members from across the ideological spectrum sounded frustrated by the arguments. “This is a highly technical issue,” Justice Samuel Alito once said. “It just seems to me like you’re asking us to do a type of analysis that we’re not very good at and that we didn’t expect when we took this case,” Kagan said.

Given the thorny and high-stakes legal and ethical issues surrounding AI, we can take solace in the fact that the highest court in the most powerful country in the world… seems completely uninterested in delving into the often confusing technical details of Big Tech. At least in this case the stakes are much lower and only affect the finances of an insanely rich company and a group of (probably rich) Wall Street investors.