Nvidia and the Chip Rules

Nvidia built a chip to comply with American export rules. Then the rules changed. Markets reacted dramatically, but chances are that the chipmaker can stand the hit. In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Anthony Schiavone and host Mary Long discuss Nvidia's $5.5 billion charge and earnings from Prologis.

Then, Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey talks with Kevin Simzer, COO of Trend Micro, about AI's impact on the cybersecurity space.

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A full transcript is below.

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This video was recorded on April 16, 2025

Mary Long: The rules keep changing, but you're still listening to Motley Fool Money. I'm Mary Long, joined today by Anthony Schiavone. It's a beautiful day in Denver, Colorado. How are things in your neck of the woods?

Anthony Schiavone: Well, in Pennsylvania, it's a little bit colder. Well, maybe not the Colorado, but cold and windy in Pennsylvania.

Mary Long: Sometimes that's just how spring goes. Feeling a little cold and windy in the stock market, perhaps as well, that's, in large part due to warning that NVIDIA issued late yesterday, that warning being that the company will be taking a $5.5 billion charge. That comes after the US said that NVIDIA will need to get a license in order to export a certain AI chip. This chip is called the H20 processor, and it was built specifically to comply with American export rules. But those rules have now changed under the new administration. Top line, what's this mean for NVIDIA?

Anthony Schiavone: I think that's the question that the market is trying to answer right now, and I think this added uncertainty is really the main reason why we're seeing video shares down today. I think the market has taken a sell now and ask questions later approach with regards to this news. This is a rapidly evolving situation. As I understand it, this export restriction can be reversed at any time. I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what this means for NVIDIA over the long term. But if there is any company that can navigate a $5.5 billion write-down, it's probably the $2.5 trillion company that's fueling the AI revolution. I believe they have more cash than debt on their balance sheet, as well. I think they are in a good position to navigate this for the long term, and we'll see what the future holds with regards to these restrictions.

Mary Long: NVIDIA is likely in a good position to navigate this moving forward. But the thing about NVIDIA is that even if you don't own shares of that company directly, chances are you still probably feel it when this company is on the downswing. The S&P, the Dow, the NASDAQ, they've all been brought down this morning, largely as a result of what's going on in the chip sector. We see other semiconductor companies being brought down on related news, as well. Just zooming out, how are you feeling about the stock market on this Wednesday morning?

Anthony Schiavone: I think how an investor feels about the stock market, I think it largely depends on their time horizon. I think that depends how you feel about the market. As somebody in their 20s like myself, I feel pretty good about the market right now because I can purchase assets at a lower price compared to just a few weeks ago. But for somebody approaching retirement age, you're likely not feeling too great right now. It's not like the market is exactly cheap right now, at least compared to historical metrics. It's possible the market falls further from here. We just don't know, but what we do know is that the has historically generated a positive return and roughly 88% of five-year periods and 94% of 10-year periods. That makes me pretty optimistic about the future, even though we're going through a pretty rough patch right now, a volatile patch, as well, so.

Mary Long: For any company, when big news hits or when a stock dips into the red, of course, there's this little devil on somebody's shoulder who can be whispering, is it time to sell? We talk a lot here at The Fool about only selling if you see what appears to be a genuine change to your original thesis. It's one thing to theorize about that, but in actuality, how do you spot a genuine thesis-changing event?

Anthony Schiavone: I think you have to know why you own the stock in the first place. When you have new information come along, you're able to see that new information is in conflict with your original thesis. I think it's important to remember that there's always going to be a completely valid reason to sell, either to sell the market or to sell a stock. But a lot of the time, that reason doesn't impact the two or three variables that drive long-term returns. With that in mind, I like to be very slow to react to new information, especially in an environment like we're in today, where policy can change overnight. I think it's important to react slow. If I can make a plug for dividends for a second, the nice thing about dividends is if your conviction isn't as high on a specific stock, you can just take that dividend, take it in cash, and reallocate it to a higher conviction idea. That's why I like to run my own portfolio, but in general, just know why you own a stock, and be slow to react to new news. That's the way I like to spot these changing events.

Mary Long: You ask if you could make a plug for dividends. Of course, you can make a plug for dividend, and that gives us a perfect segue into the next story I want to hit with you because if I'm talking to Anthony Schiavone, I got to use the opportunity to talk about REITs. One of your favorite REITs, Prologis, reported its first-quarter earnings this morning. This, for those that don't know, is a logistics, real estate company, so they own, manage, and develop logistics facilities around the world, and they play a key role in helping get stuff get where it needs to go. They play into e-commerce trends and just larger supply chains. Highlights from the quarter that I'll call out before kicking it to you, and total revenue up about 9% year over year for Prologis. They saw a 35% increase in new leases, though occupancy was down ever so slightly for the quarter, I think covering around just under 95%. You've got core FFO per share that beat analyst estimates, and it increased by $0.14 compared to a year ago. All that and perhaps other highlights as well. What are you, Anthony, paying attention to in this report?

Anthony Schiavone: The operating fundamentals of this report were pretty much on par with what I think analysts expected. But what I was really interested in was the guidance, and I think that's going to be the big theme this earnings season. It's not just for Prologis or REITs, but just the market in general. I think if a company reaffirms its guidance in this type of environment we're currently in, I think that's a pretty good sign, and the market is going to reward companies for doing that. That's exactly what we saw a Prologis. Their guidance pretty much didn't change at all, except they expect to deploy less capital into new development projects. I think that's related to a lot of the uncertainty we're currently seeing. Overall, just a pretty strong, solid report, nothing too unexpected from Prologis.

Mary Long: That guidance almost comes as surprising to me because, again, understanding that this is a player in the e-commerce and in this global supply chain, I would think that, if we're in the midst of a trade war, that's got to affect a company like Prologis. Do you see the current policy and macro environment as affecting them perhaps more than they anticipate, or no, do you think that that guidance is pretty in line?

Anthony Schiavone: I think a tariff uncertainty could definitely impact leasing over the short run. I think maybe we could see that impact, second quarter results, maybe. But I think that's more of a short-term worry. If you think about over the long term, you think about new supply, it's going to be harder to build these warehouses if you have tariffs coming in, tariffs on building supplies, and that thing. Interest rates have also picked up a little bit last couple of weeks. That's going to get harder to build new warehouses so that benefits existing. Warehouse owners like Prologis. If you look at Prologis' balance sheet, their debt-to-total market cap is something like 25%, and their average interest rate is like 3%. They have the financial power to navigate a lot of this uncertainty. I think that just separates them from some of the lower-quality industrial players in an environment like this. I think it ultimately benefits them over the long run and can make them more aggressive when it comes to acquisitions and things like that.

Mary Long: In February, Prologis gave a heads-up that it's co-founder and CEO. Moghadam would be retiring at the end of the year. Moghadam's been at the helm of Prologis for more than 40 years. We talk about how the uncertain macro environment might affect this company in the near term. A CEO change might affect the company as well. But before maybe we get to what you would expect or hope for from whoever's coming in to replace Moghadam, what lessons, wisdom, practices would you like to see a new leader take from this past CEO who's really leaving the company with, as you mentioned, strong balance sheet, strong business fundamentals, etc?

Anthony Schiavone: Honestly, this leadership transition that they're currently in could not have gone any smoother so far. The new guy who's stepping in is Dan Letter, and he's been with the company for a long time. There's actually a really good piece in Fortune magazine talking about the leadership transition that's taking place. One of the things that I found interesting was that Dan Letter and Hamid Moghadam, their offices have been right next to each other for two years now. This has been in the works for a very long time. Hamid Moghadam he's stepping out at the end of the year. There's a really long transition phase in here. With Dan Letter stepping in, I just want to see P Lodges continue to be the leader not only in the industrial warehouse space, but just a leader in the rate space. They're always, I believe the first REIT to come out and issue guidance, report earnings every single quarter. I think that's an important part. They're always out there leading. They're always running the company in the right way, respecting their equity, respecting shareholders, respecting their tenants, and their partners. I would just like to see that continue.

Mary Long: An interesting point on leading Prologis used to be the world's largest REIT by market cap, and now it's second in line. Its crown has been snatched by American Tower, which now holds that distinction. Do you think that that distinction of world's largest REIT by market cap actually has weight to it?

Anthony Schiavone: For REIT, bigger is usually better, but I'm not sure there's much of a difference between an 80 billion market cap and a $100 billion market cap. I don't think the distinction really matters too much. The reason why bigger is usually better is that REITs can borrow more debt, they could borrow it at more advantageous terms. But I really don't think there's too much of a difference there besides bragging rights.

Mary Long: Well, speaking of bragging rights, our Breakfast News newsletter asked readers. They closed out with this question. Breakfast News is a newsletter that goes out to subscribers. It's free every day, and it summarizes stock market and business news. We close out with a question that we dubbed the Foolish fun question. Today's Foolish fun question highlighted this switch up between American Tower taking Prologis' title as world's largest REIT by Market Cap and pose the question of whether or not readers think Prologis will eventually reclaim its status as world's largest REIT or if American Tower will continue to reign supreme. Anthony, we'll close out by giving the crystal ball over to you. What do you think? Are you making any predictions on this one?

Anthony Schiavone: Well, since there's no timeline on this, I'm going to go with Prologis, because at the end of the day, they're essentially selling land, they're selling space, and they own a lot of the best locations. Eventually, I think their market cap will catch up.

Mary Long: Here we go. Anthony Schiavone always a pleasure talking to you. Thanks for joining us this morning on Motley Fool Money.

Anthony Schiavone: Thanks for having me.

Mary Long: For all the excitement about artificial intelligence, there's also a lot to worry about. One of those worries enhanced cyber attacks. Trend Micro is trying to get ahead of those threats. There are a cybersecurity company that's working with NVIDIA to build autonomous cybersecurity agents. Up next, Ricky Mulvey talks with Kevin Simzer, Trend Micro's chief operating officer, about how AI is changing the fraud and security industries.

Ricky Mulvey: Kevin, I want to start abroad because your company sees a lot of cybersecurity threats for organizations all over the globe. What are just the biggest cybersecurity threats your customers are facing right now?

Kevin Simzer: Ricky, we do have an interesting point of view here at Trend Micro because we've got a large number of our customers actually right across the globe. We're a multibillion-dollar company, over 500,000 enterprise customers, of which the majority of them are outside the US. It gives us quite a unique global perspective. It's the ever-evolving threat landscape, we've been seeing it for a long time, continues to be ransomware is the number 1 threat vector that we continue to see all kinds of different techniques. Definitely, the emergence of generative AI has made a lot of the email spear phishing attacks much more sophisticated. Email security it might seem pretty boring and mundane, but actually, that's a very big threat vector that we continue to see.

Ricky Mulvey: Generative AI makes things more personal. You can think of it from a marketing context where advertisers are able to personalize messages given someone's demographic and exactly who they are. Spear phishing is also a lot like that because you can personalize a message to get someone to click on a malware link. How much more advanced are these email threats now than they were, maybe just like two or three years ago?

Kevin Simzer: They're much more advanced. That's a given with all the technology that's out there. If you think about the business model of a threat actor, they have been also adopting a lot of the disruptive technology that's been coming out. They've adopted the Cloud. They have software as a service. They pick up various techniques that are evolving through our own businesses, as well. They are also adopting them. But their fundamental business model they were OK with a high failure rate. They could throw 1,000 emails or 1,000 different attempts, and they only needed one to be successful. Now, what it seems is they're getting much more sophisticated, much more polished, much more organized. That means that actually their success rate is becoming higher. You're not getting the emails with the spelling errors, and it's very obvious that it's a spear phishing attack, much more polished and complete.

Ricky Mulvey: You mentioned ransomware is a big threat. How does Cloud migration affect that? Because I'm unfamiliar with this space. On the one hand, you could see now that data is stored everywhere, it would be significantly more difficult for a bad actor to lock down. The other side of that is more people are working from home. There's more entry points for someone to get in to lockdown in organization's data and then demand millions and millions of dollars to continue to run your business as normal. How are you seeing it from your perspective?

Kevin Simzer: Fundamentally, what has been changing is the attack surface of an organization has been ever expanding. It started with remote work. It evolved into public Cloud. Now with AI, the attack surface is even bigger. But of course, as businesses, we want to encourage the use of these technologies. As a cybersecurity professional, we feel it's our obligation to provide the platform that's needed in order to help businesses protect themselves against that broader attack surface.

Ricky Mulvey: Data sovereignty is this idea that where your data lives determines what rules apply to it. There's an example on your site. Example, in the UAE, organizations must obtain explicit consent from individuals before processing their personal data. Honestly, not a bad idea. Maybe we should be doing more of that. However, the way you're describing it is since the US has taken a more isolationist stance, you're seeing responses from large organizations to basically pull their data from the US and move it closer to home. The good thing about this for the US is the biggest technology companies tend to live here. But how are you seeing this play out? Is it companies are basically leaving US data centers to go to their home country? You know this space better than me. How's it going down?

Kevin Simzer: No, and I think you were touching on the key elements. At the end of the day, businesses really do want to be adopting public Cloud. But the hyperscalars don't exist. The big hyperscalars, the largest of the hyperscalars, they just don't have a point of presence in all 200-plus countries around the world. They're starting to figure out, well, maybe I need to move some of my data into my own private data centers. We're seeing a resurgence in and around this thing called the AI Data Center. It's really pushed heavily by NVIDIA, and we're seeing some companies want to adopt their own physical AI data centers so that their AI data is locally resident. But we're also seeing some of the public Cloud hyperscalers like Google adopt a model where they can actually run a specific point of presence in a country. They call it distributed public Cloud infrastructure, so they will run it locally within a country for you. There's lots of different options available for customers, but the headline is that customers are thinking about it now. Customers outside the US are definitely thinking about it.

Ricky Mulvey: NVIDIA talks a lot about sovereign AI and how basically every nation, as a part of their national security defense, needs to develop their own AI infrastructure. You said companies are thinking about moving their data. Cloud migrations are really difficult. Thinking is one thing. Are you seeing them take action on it right now, or do you think a lot of them are waiting for this uncertainty within the tariff situation to play out a little bit?

Kevin Simzer: I'm seeing some of the more progressive companies actually be out in front, and they're actually making the decision now. We're definitely doing deals specifically with data sovereignty in mind. We happen to have a platform, which is a bit unique. Here at Trend Micro, it's a bit unique in that we can run in a public Cloud environment or we can run in an on-premises environment. Customers tend to be talking to us whenever they are actually choosing maybe to actually bring their cybersecurity data closer to home.

Ricky Mulvey: We talked about NVIDIA a little bit. You're also working with them to build AI agents. AI agents versus ChatGPT. When you go into ChatGPT, you have to press the button for ChatGPT to take action to give you an answer. AI agents are allowed to take action on your behalf. How are AI agents changing cybersecurity? How is it different from just traditional endpoint security from a few years ago?

Kevin Simzer: Well, it's fundamentally different, and it's really expanding that attack surface even more. One of the things that people don't necessarily realize is when a company is adopting AI, what it tends to do is it tends to break the access control silos that were built in an organization. For example, many companies had their HR data in one location. They had their CRM data, their customer data in one location. They had their finance data in one location. Now, as you bring that all together with AI, all of a sudden, some of those access control mechanisms no longer exist. It's really important as you think about that type of a move, to be thinking about the broader attack surface. If you think about over the last couple of years, generative AI was the big topic. This year and next year, it will be about agentic AI and building out those agents and seeing how the power of this autonomous, these actions can be taken. I was at Google Next last week, and they introduced their framework called Agent Space, and it's going to allow AI agents to communicate with other AI agents. AI communicating with AI. It's an exciting time with all of this disruptive technology, and we want to make sure, as a cybersecurity company, that we're putting the guardrails in place to help companies not get themselves in trouble.

Ricky Mulvey: Well, I can also imagine that changes a lot of the spear phishing attacks we were talking about earlier, where if you have a bad actor AI agent trying to phish your other AI agent in your email inbox, that's a completely different attack surface than even today, it seems like.

Kevin Simzer: It does make it much more complicated.

Ricky Mulvey: One of the decisions you made is that your AI agent, Trend Cybertron, I believe that's open source.

Kevin Simzer: It is.

Ricky Mulvey: I know your company does hackathons, that thing. What's the reasoning to do that? It seems like that could also give bad actors and to figure out how to hack your AI agent.

Kevin Simzer: We fundamentally do believe in an open-source methodology. It's great to have everything published so you know exactly what's going on. But the big reason we did it is we wanted to be the first to offer up in NVIDIA's marketplace an LLM specifically trained for cybersecurity. We took all of our knowledge that we have, and we packaged it up in this thing called Cybertron, and we made it available. Our hope is that people will expand it because the power of this is if people start to contribute to it and get it linked into as many AI agents as possible, then all of a sudden, really the power of it tends to grow, and that's what we're looking forward to seeing happen.

Ricky Mulvey: One of the big storylines I've seen, as well, is with the rise of generative AI, that's changed the demands of software developers. One of the fears for I think a lot of college graduates is that this is going to take the job of a lot of junior software developers. You're the chief operating officer of a large cybersecurity company. How are you seeing this trend play out, and how are you thinking about hiring software developers with the rise of generative AI?

Kevin Simzer: For us, AI is not about cost reduction. It's about actually more exciting productivity improvements so that we can actually drive more innovation and drive our top-line business. When I talk to CEO of Workday or the CEO of Service Now, they're thinking about it exactly the same way. It's not about reducing human in tech. It's actually about expanding. We're still hiring engineers, even though a large percentage of our code is automatically generated by AI, but we're still hiring software engineers, and so too are others.

Ricky Mulvey: Then, as we wrap up, what are the biggest storylines or metrics you want Trend Micro's investors to follow for the next 2, 3, 5 years ahead?

Kevin Simzer: We have a chairman who is the founder of the company. We've been in business for 35 years, and he subscribes to the philosophy of sustainable superior performance, SSP. To him, what that means is we've been around for 35-plus years. We want to be around for another 35-plus years. In order to do that, you need top-line growth, but you also need net margins to be created. You're going to see us continue to drive. We have a road to 2027, which is our North Star business model. You're going to see us continue to drive top-line performance, but also improve bottom-line performance. Investors should be appreciative of the fact that you're actually generating those profits so that you can reinvest them back into the business.

Ricky Mulvey: Kevin Simzer, Chief Operating Officer of Trend Micro, appreciate your time and your insight, and thanks for joining us on Motley Fool Money.

Kevin Simzer: Thank you.

Mary Long: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against some buyers sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards, and it's not approved by advertisers. Motley Fool Money team, I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Anthony Schiavone has positions in Prologis. Mary Long has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Prologis. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, American Tower, Nvidia, Prologis, ServiceNow, and Workday. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $180 calls on American Tower, long January 2026 $90 calls on Prologis, and short January 2026 $185 calls on American Tower. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.