On March 25, 2026, U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. of the Northern District of California issued an order certifying a class of NVIDIA shareholders in a long-running securities fraud suit against the world’s largest chipmaker and its CEO, Jensen Huang. In a 50-page opinion, the court held that the defendants failed to rebut the presumption of classwide reliance afforded by the “fraud on the market” doctrine and green-lighted the case to proceed as a class action. The court also rejected the defendants’ argument that the long-term trading strategies of a handful of putative class members defeated a showing of “predominance” under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, explaining that “the general fact that some investors purchased a stock as part of a long-term strategy does not mean that the investors would have traded had they known about the claimed fraud.” The court noted that “defendants like NVIDIA would be almost completely insulated from such class actions under this theory.”
The case, filed by Lannebo Kapitalförvaltning AB, one of Sweden’s largest institutional investors, alleges that NVIDIA misled the market about its reliance on highly volatile sales of graphic processing units (GPUs) to cryptocurrency miners prior to the historic crypto crash of 2018. The complaint was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024 when it dismissed Nvidia’s appeal of the Ninth Circuit’s order reversing the district court’s dismissal of the suit as improvidently granted. The case will now proceed through discovery.
The Kessler Topaz team representing Lannebo and the Class includes Matthew Mustokoff, Nathan Hasiuk, Nathaniel Simon, and Ryan Shelton-Benson.
The decision can be found here.