WASHINGTON (AP) — The supreme court on Wednesday seemed likely to keep a class action suit alive Nvidia to mislead investors about its reliance on selling computer chips to mine the volatile cryptocurrency.

The judges heard arguments in the tech company’s appeal of a lower court ruling that allowed the 2018 lawsuit by a Swedish investment management firm to continue.

It is one of two high court cases involving class action lawsuits against technology companies. Last week, judges wrestled with whether to shut down a multibillion-dollar investor class action lawsuit against Facebook parent Meta over the privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.

On Wednesday, a majority of the court that included liberal and conservative justices appeared to reject the arguments presented by Neal Katyal, Nvidia’s lawyer in Santa Clara, California.

“It’s becoming less and less clear why we took this case and why you should win it,” Justice Elena Kagan said.

The lawsuit followed a decline in the cryptocurrency’s profitability, which caused Nvidia’s revenue to fall short of forecasts and led to a 28% drop in the company’s share price.

In 2022, Nvidia paid a $5.5 million fine to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that it failed to disclose that cryptomining was a significant source of revenue growth from the sale of graphics processing units that were produced and marketed for gaming. The company did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement.

Nvidia has led the artificial intelligence sector to become one of the biggest companies on the stock market as the tech giants continue to spend heavily on the company’s chips and data centers needed to train and operate their AI systems.

That dominance in chipmaking cemented Nvidia’s place as the poster boy for the artificial intelligence boom — what CEO Jensen Huang called “the next industrial revolution.” Demand for generative AI products that can compose documents, take pictures and serve as personal assistants has fueled sales of Nvidia’s specialized chips over the past year.

Nvidia is among the most valuable companies in the S&P 500, worth more than $3 trillion. The company is set to report its third-quarter earnings next week.

In the Supreme Court case, the company argues that the investors’ lawsuit should be dismissed because it does not comply with a 1995 law, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which is intended to prohibit frivolous complaints.

A district court judge dismissed the complaint before a federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled it could go forward. The Biden administration is backing investors.

A decision is expected by early summer.

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Associated Press writer Sarah Parvini in Los Angeles contributed to this report