A federal judge has cleared a class of investors to sue Nvidia and CEO Jensen Huang over claims the chipmaker buried more than $1 billion in crypto mining GPU sales inside its gaming revenue, exposing shareholders to undisclosed market risk during 2017 and 2018.
SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA — A U.S. federal judge certified a securities fraud class action against Nvidia and CEO Jensen Huang on Wednesday, March 25, allowing shareholders who bought the company’s stock between August 10, 2017, and November 15, 2018, to pursue their claims collectively, according to an order issued by Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. of the Northern District of California.
The ruling moves the case into active evidence gathering — and for the first time, Nvidia must directly confront a critical question it has never fully answered: how much of its explosive GPU revenue during the crypto boom was actually coming from miners, not gamers?
That distinction matters far more than it might appear. According to court filings cited in the case, Nvidia generated approximately $1.7 billion in crypto-linked GPU sales during the period, with roughly $1.13 billion allegedly not clearly reported as such — instead recorded under the gaming division. The gaming segment carried a far lower risk profile in investor eyes. Revenue from PC gamers was considered stable and predictable. Revenue driven by cryptocurrency miners was volatile by nature, tied entirely to the rise and fall of token prices. By allegedly routing mining revenue through gaming figures, Nvidia’s financial results appeared more resilient than they actually were.
Internal company records cited in the lawsuit tell a specific story. Executives tracked GPU sales to crypto miners through weekly internal reports and China-specific data, which showed that 60–70% of GeForce revenue in China was linked to miners at peak periods. Nvidia even created dedicated “Crypto SKUs” to handle part of the demand — yet the lawsuit claims the majority of miner purchases still appeared in gaming revenue figures on public disclosures. Publicly, Huang and former CFO Colette Kress attributed the growth to what they called “strong organic demand from gamers.”
The consequence became visible in November 2018, when Kress acknowledged on an earnings call that gaming card inventory was taking longer to clear and pricing was down following a “sharp crypto falloff.” Nvidia’s stock fell approximately 28.5% over the two trading sessions that followed. The class action argues investors suffered those losses because they were never told how dependent the company’s growth had become on a volatile mining market.
Nvidia’s own response after the Supreme Court dismissed its appeal in December 2024 offers an insight the company may regret. A spokesperson told reporters that investors who held Nvidia stock through the period “have done incredibly well, as our corporate strategy unfolded as we consistently predicted.” That framing sidesteps the core legal issue entirely: whether the risk those investors were carrying, without their knowledge, was accurately disclosed at the time of purchase.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reached its own conclusion on that question in 2022, fining Nvidia $5.5 million and issuing a cease-and-desist order for inadequate disclosures linked to crypto mining’s impact on its gaming business — without Nvidia admitting or denying the findings. Class certification now opens the door to a far larger reckoning. Securities fraud class actions of this scale, particularly those backed by internal documentary evidence, often settle for sums that dwarf regulatory fines.
The lawsuit is led by Swedish institutional investor Öhman Fonder, with Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann as lead counsel. A case management conference is scheduled for April 21, 2026, at which Judge Gilliam Jr. will outline the next procedural steps.
What makes this case harder for Nvidia than the SEC settlement is the evidentiary threshold. Judge Gilliam’s certification order specifically noted that Nvidia failed to rebut the plaintiffs’ evidence of price impact — a legal standard requiring defendants to show that the allegedly false statements did not actually affect the stock price. Nvidia could not meet it.
The eight-year journey of this lawsuit — filed in 2018, dismissed in 2021, revived by the Ninth Circuit in 2023, rejected by the Supreme Court in 2024, and now certified in 2026 — reflects something larger than a single disclosure dispute. During the same period, Nvidia became the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, in large part by positioning itself as a company whose leadership had exceptional foresight. The class action now asks a court to determine whether that foresight included knowing that what investors were told about revenue did not match what internal data was showing.
