The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI 0.95%) was unchanged at 11:20 a.m. EST Friday, underperforming the broader indices. The Dow shook off increasing tension between the U.S. and China as the former charged Chinese company Huawei with racketeering.
Shares of Intel (INTC 5.41%) managed a modest gain Friday morning, perhaps buoyed by a strong earnings report from graphics chip company NVIDIA. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase (JPM 1.39%) was down slightly as the bank looks to tighten up access to customer data.
NVIDIA's data center rebound good news for Intel
When semiconductor giant Intel reported its fourth-quarter results in January, the data center segment was the star of the show. Data center revenue soared 19% to $7.2 billion, an acceleration compared to the rest of 2019. For the full year, Intel's data center revenue was up just 2%.
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What's more, Intel's data center strength was driven by both volume and pricing. Unit volumes were up 12% year over year, while average selling prices jumped 5%.
Other companies are also seeing a rebound in data center demand. Graphics chip developer NVIDIA reported its fourth-quarter results on Thursday, beating analyst estimates thanks to solid data center growth. After a long stagnation, NVIDIA's data center revenue rose 42% from the prior-year period.
A strong demand environment is good news for Intel, because the company is facing intense competition from rival Advanced Micro Devices in the server CPU market. AMD's server CPU market share is still small, just 4.5% in the fourth quarter, but it's been growing thanks to the company's EPYC chips. Intel has already cut prices on certain server chips, and more price cutting may be necessary to beat back AMD.
Intel stock hasn't really suffered from the rising competition. Shares were up 0.2% on Friday, bringing the one-year gain to about 34%.
JPMorgan Chase sets deadline for fintechs
Mega-bank JPMorgan Chase is looking to modernize how customers access their data. Reuters reported on Thursday that the bank has informed financial technology companies that they will be banned from accessing customer information by July 30 unless they sign data access agreements and get behind a plan to stop using customer passwords to access data.
Apps that aggregate financial information have become increasingly popular. They generally require users to hand over their banking passwords, allowing the apps or the third-party aggregators that power those apps to log in and collect financial information. That process often involves scraping data from the bank's webpage, instead of accessing a formal API.
JPMorgan will begin blocking automated access to customer accounts after the deadline, requiring any fintech apps or aggregators to instead use an API that exposes limited information authorized by the bank customer. The bank said that it had reached data access agreements that cover 95% of all data access requests, so there should be little disruption for its banking customers.
Since handing over your banking password to third parties is effectively giving away the keys to the kingdom, JPMorgan's limited API approach should be inherently more secure. The move could drive other banks to adopt similar policies, and it could ultimately drive more fintech companies to use aggregators like Visa-owned Plaid to reduce the complexity of accessing customer information.
Shares of JPMorgan treaded water on Friday, down slightly by late morning. Shares of bank are up nearly 34% over the past year.
