US Supreme Court bails on NVIDIA case, allowing a shareholder lawsuit to proceed

The US Supreme Court dismissed an NVIDIA case it previously agreed to hear as “improvidently granted.” In other words: “Oops, we never should’ve taken this one.” The decision lets most of the lawsuit, brought by shareholders against the chip maker, proceed.

An investment firm and a pension fund brought the case against NVIDIA, claiming the company misled investors about its reliance on the crypto-mining industry. The suit claims NVIDIA concealed its dependence on the market before a 2018 crash that sunk the chip maker’s stock prices. (For better or worse, cryptocurrency has rebounded, and Bitcoin recently passed the $100,000 plateau for the first time.)

The court’s unanimous dismissal reflected its apparent aversion to hearing the case’s complex technical details. “The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted” is all the decision said. That language was identical to a remarkably similar dismissal in a case SCOTUS heard last month against Meta, which also accused it of deceiving investors.

The Washington Post reports that the justices offered hints at the NVIDIA dismissal when they heard arguments in mid-November. “It becomes less and less clear why we took this case … and … why you should win it,” Justice Elena Kagan reportedly said. The New York Times says court members across the ideological spectrum sounded frustrated with the arguments. “This is a highly technical subject,” Justice Samuel Alito said at one point. “It just seems to me that you’re asking us to engage in a kind of analysis that we are not very good at and weren’t expecting to when we took this case,” Kagan said.

As AI’s thorny and ultra-high-stakes legal and ethical questions loom, we can take comfort in the fact that the highest court in the world’s most powerful nation sounds… utterly uninterested in diving into Big Tech’s often head-spinning technical details. At least the stakes are much lower in this case, only affecting the finances of a crazy-rich corporation and a group of (likely rich) Wall Street investors.