Is the chaos of Trump Tariffs over? (I’m taking bets.) Mr. Market sure thinks so but some technology earnings might have a vote this week.

Meanwhile, earnings from five of the so-called Magnificent Seven arrive in a cluster this week. Amazon (AMZN: NASDAQ), Apple (AAPL: NASDAQ), Alphabet (GOOG: NASDAQ), Meta (META: NASDAQ), and Microsoft (MSFT: NASDAQ) built a bull market on concentrated power and easy stories. We expect their number to diverge this week, and this may well signal an end to the legend of the “Mag Seven.”

Have you checked out the website we built for you, dear reader? The full archive and research database live here: https://epistrophy.beehiiv.com.

As always, I’m focused on three things:
1) Technology-driven change;
2) the latest in innovation and startup trends, and;
3) stock fraud.

Companies Discussed

In This Note:

1. Companies Discussed

2. In NVIDIA’s Glow, Navitas’ Shadow

3. Tweet O’ The Week

4. Epistrophy In The News

5. 📆 of Epistrophy Events

6. Availability This Week

In NVIDIA’s Glow, Navitas’ Shadow

NVIDIA’s misunderstood 800-volt data-center design leaves Navitas excited, but unchanged

On Monday, Oct. 13, NVIDIA (NVDA: NASDAQ) technical marketing exec. Harry Petty reposted an old blog post.

It wouldn’t have been news, but one of the 18 companies listed in the blog post put out a press release trumpeting the mention. Suddenly, that company, Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS: NASDAQ), had cast away its existence as a struggling-iPhone-charger-chipmaker and recast itself as an AI power player. The stock erupted, Petty’s lightly-attended presentation at the Open Compute Project was now a mysterious legend. 

Navitas is now an AI stock. But is it an AI company? 

(Full disclosure, Navitas is now one of our rare AI shorts — many more important disclosures at the end of this note.)

Nvidia’s Shadow

Navitas went public pitching itself as the world’s first pure-play gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) power company. It marketed its “GaNSense” and “GeneSiC” platforms for efficiency above 97%, pitching lighter chargers, reduced copper use and cooler data centers. In theory, that puts Navitas at the heart of two secular booms: electric vehicles and AI data centers. 

Navitas’ biggest headline of 2025 wasn’t a contract but a mention. An Nvidia’s July blog post on its “800 VDC Architecture” – a new concept for datacenter power – listed Navitas among 18 technology “contributors.” That was the post repeated on Oct. 13. The initiative is central to Nvidia’s push to rewire AI data centers, replacing layers of inefficient AC–DC conversion with a direct high-voltage DC feed. The payoff—lower copper use, less heat and higher rack density—matches Navitas’ marketing pitch.

But the fine print matters. Nvidia named contributors ranging from industrial giants to niche suppliers, with no indication of procurement volumes or binding contracts. For Nvidia, “development support” can mean little more than testing engineering samples. For suppliers, it offers marketing oxygen without commercial certainty.

Navitas seized the opening. It issued a press release trumpeting a “collaboration” with Nvidia, repeating the name four times, though Nvidia itself offered no endorsement, no executive quote and no hard commitments. But the release drove shares that had traded as low as $1.52 to $17.79, over 1100%. Yet not a single Nvidia order, forecasts or competitive award has materialized.

Still, the Nvidia halo is not meaningless. If Navitas can qualify its 200-mm GaN wafers at Powerchip in time, it could ride Nvidia’s move to 800-V data-center power. But the risk is crushing: a single delay, yield miss, or supplier swap could leave Navitas with engineering bragging rights but no business.

From Mobile Chargers to Data Centers

Navitas was founded in 2013 by mid-career engineers from International Rectifier and Vicor. The pitch: repackage GaN as a next-generation alternative to silicon for power conversion. Its early business came from cutthroat customers in cheap mobile fast chargers—Amazon (AMZN: NASDAQ), Anker, Belkin, Dell Technologies (DELL: NYSE), LG Electronics (066570: KRX) and Xiaomi. Competition from Texas Instruments (TXN: NYSE), Onsemi (ON: NASDAQ) and Chinese suppliers kept margins thin.

The company went public in 2021 through a SPAC merger with Live Oak Acquisition Corp. II, steered by ex-Wunderlich and B. Riley bankers. Shares peaked above $20 before sliding into penny-stock territory. In 2022, Navitas spent $100 million acquiring GeneSiC to add SiC devices, hoping to scale into higher power applications. The thesis—GaN plus SiC as a cleaner, denser alternative to silicon—was appealing. Execution was not.

Tech Promise vs. Manufacturing Reality

Navitas company relied on Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM: NYSE) to make its complicated GaN wafers. On July 1, 2025, Navitas revealed TSMC will exit GaN production in 2027. Navitas is now scrambling to qualify Powerchip as a replacement, aiming for late 2025 samples and 2026 volume production. That timeline is tight and scaling high-voltage GaN on 200-mm wafers at a new foundry is high risk. Navitas has already written off a $2 million deposit after supply failures. 

The Sun Also Sets

Navitas’ press releases show a consistent pattern: vague “partnerships” without details on revenue, volumes, or contract terms. Among the announcements that have yielded so little: Changan Automobile (Jan 2025), BrightLoop (Jun 2025), Great Wall (Apr 2025) and a “Tier-1 mobile OEMs (2023–25) claimed “mass production with all top 10 mobile OEMs” but the results were diminimus.

Of late Navitas points to residential solar as a growth driver. Its key customer: Enphase (ENPH: NASDAQ). But Enphase is under pressure. On February 28, 2025, the Trump administration imposed 10% tariffs on Chinese batteries, later extending duties to inverters and storage. Subsidies shrank as Treasury’s discretion on tax credits narrowed. Enphase cut Q3 guidance to $350 million and warned gross margins would fall to 41–44%. Solar isn’t positioned to rescue Navitas.

Accounting Red Flags

On March 27, 2025, Navitas dismissed Moss Adams as auditor and appointed KPMG the next day. At the same time, it disclosed a material weakness in internal controls spanning far and wide: misclassified cash flows, misreported expenses, faulty equity-method results and unreliable R&D accounting. Navitas admitted its financial reporting “could not be relied upon.” Progress on remediation was still “ongoing” in Q2 2025. Auditor turnover during unresolved weaknesses is a classic red flag.

The problems go deeper. Navitas has a long history of missteps in share-based compensation accounting and liability classification. Meanwhile, it has lavished insiders with equity. The 2021 plan granted Sheridan and co-founder Dan Kinzer 3.25 million options each at a $15.51 strike—worthless today—but management piled on new awards. By 2024, 9.6 million RSUs and 8.0 million options were outstanding, plus 9.8 million shares authorized for future issuance. Worse, the plan includes an “evergreen clause”: each January through 2031 the pool expands by up to 4% of outstanding shares, regardless of performance. Navtias’ material weakness specifically cites equity accounting – even as it issues execs more equity.

Selling Sheridan

For years, Gene Sheridan was Navitas’ public face, but by 2025 his primary role was as a seller of its stock. Between 2023 and 2025, Sheridan and other insiders unloaded 21.7 million shares, pocketing $137 million. His last disposal—a $9.7 million sale in May 2025—was perfectly timed: squeezed between a high-profile press release invoking Nvidia’s name and a brutal quarterly earnings report.

On August 31, 2025, Sheridan resigned at 58 years old. After his fantastic windfall in share sales, he’s down to less than 3% ownership. For investors, the message is clear: the man who built Navitas and had the most insight into its prospects chose to exit almost entirely in cash.

Up Next

Sheridan’s successor Chris Allexandre, a Renesas veteran,  inherits a company bleeding $4.1 million per month.

A new “Executive Steering Committee” was formed to oversee capital allocation and hiring. But the first real test comes November 5 with Q3 earnings. Until then, investors face a company with collapsing margins, no clear revenue driver and a leadership vacuum.

Navitas is caught in the middle ground. Its SiC line can handle the voltage but not the switching speed. Its GaN line can switch fast but not high enough. Bridging that gap would take new materials, new partners and years of engineering Navitas has only just begun. Even then it’s a long shot. NVIDIA’s 800-volt architecture doesn’t exclude Navitas, but it does define a frontier beyond its current reach. 

Navitas’ slogan—“Electrify Our World”— rings hollow. What began as a GaN charger business never scaled into sustainable profits. The company tried to pivot into SiC, then solar, now AI data centers. Each time the narrative shifted, but losses remained. Nvidia’s glow offers little more than reflected light.

Tweet O’ The Week

Epistrophy In The News

“If AI goes the way it’s going,” NewsNations with Connell McShane said to me last week, “a lotta big time capitalists are going to starting sounding like socialists.” What a great time to talk about our economics research that looked at AI hiring, employment and wages (“Wall-E vs. Workers, Oct. 12, 2025”)! A fun conversation.

And on Schwab Network with Nicole Petallides, I laid out the case that the Magnificent Seven trade is running out of road. Leadership that narrow creates fragility, especially with tariffs shifting the economics of global tech supply chains. We also dug into quantum computing’s emerging role in the data center and why its earliest impact will be far from sci-fi headlines.

📆 of Epistrophy Events

Availability This Week

I’m in San Francisco all week. Plenty of time for quick calls and deeper dives on how earnings and trade policy will reshape capital spending in AI infrastructure.

Written reports are available to clients, with video summaries on YouTube, and of course our popular summaries of the summaries on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.