The short seller who saw signs of Nvidia's China scandal months ago claims Megaspeed isn't the ony company helping China access chips

By Joseph Adinolfi

'We were confident in the research initially, and we're still confident in it now,' says Christian Lamarco, founder of Culper Research

Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive, attends a dinner hosted by Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang (in black) at a restaurant in Taipei on May 22, 2025.

When Christian Lamarco published a short report on Nvidia in May 2026, shares of the pioneering chip designer were near a record high, and Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, was preparing to accompany President Donald Trump on a trip to Beijing.

Lamarco, the 31-year-old founder of Culper Research, argued that Nvidia's China business had not "gone to zero," as the company claimed, after the U.S. banned the sale of advanced Nvidia chips to China. Instead, Lamarco said, Nvidia's China business had changed shape.

Lamarco claimed that Nvidia was still generating material revenues that were ultimately coming from Chinese companies, which were finding new ways to receive Nvidia graphics processing units directly, or accessing data centers located in countries like Malaysia that used advanced Nvidia semiconductors. He also described an "uncomfortably close relationship" between Huang and Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, a big buyer of Nvidia chips in Southeast Asia.

Six months later, over this past weekend, Nvidia's Huang acknowledged that he and the former Megaspeed executive, with whom he is not related, had engaged in an affair. The admission followed reporting in late October from the New York Times, alleging that Megaspeed's Huang had been recruited to spy on behalf of China's Ministry of State Security.

Nvidia said on Sunday that its board is initiating an independent investigation into whether its CEO has been the target of a foreign-intelligence effort.

As investors rushed to commiserate about the revelations on social media, a number of prominent accounts flagged Culper's report for being an incredibly prescient example of the power of independent research by so-called activist short sellers.

"The initial comments were overall pretty negative," Lamarco told MarketWatch during an interview on Monday. "Now, everybody and their mother is reaching out."

Lamarco founded Culper in 2019 and the firm now consists of two analysts in addition to himself. The recent Nvidia episode marks what has perhaps been Culper's most prominent work in its seven-year existence as an independent research shop.

Lamarco and his firm have previously been drawn into court battles involving celebrity attorney Alex Spiro, and once generated a few media headlines after Lamarco challenged late-night host Jimmy Fallon to a $1 million bet. Along the way, the firm has published about 40 short reports, and racked up a solid track record, including a number of wins and a handful of losses.

Nvidia shares (NVDA) have fallen by more than 20% since the Culper report was published, including a drop of more than 4% during Monday's trading session alone, FactSet data showed. Lamarco wouldn't say whether his firm is still betting against Nvidia's stock, or how much - if any - money it made as a result of the report.

"We put out the work we put out," Lamarco told MarketWatch. "We were confident in the research initially, and we're still confident in it now," he said.

Lamarco told MarketWatch that his firm invests its own money, and also works with partners who pay it a percentage of their winnings from Culper-inspired short bets. That model is fairly common in the activist short-selling space, several industry insiders have told MarketWatch.

Tip of the iceberg?

To be sure, Lamarco wasn't alone in being early to this story. Reporting on Nvidia's relationship with Singapore-based Megaspeed had appeared in the New York Times and Bloomberg News more than a year ago.

Lamarco told MarketWatch that the previous media reporting helped inspire him to dig deeper. Claims from Nvidia that its China business had collapsed after the U.S. imposed export restrictions on the most sophisticated Nvidia chips also helped to pique his interest. At the same time, the company's sales to entities based in Southeast Asia appeared to be booming.

"Those two details seemed to conflict," he said. After doing some digging, Lamarco and his team landed on the report's big reveal: Through various subsidiaries and shell companies, Culper appeared to financially link Megaspeed with a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA).

In the initial report, Culper cited a former high-level Nvidia employee who told the firm that the relationship between Megaspeed and Nvidia was just "the tip of the iceberg." Lamarco told MarketWatch on Monday that, in the course of his firm's investigation, they had found potential circumstantial evidence that linked Nvidia to at least six other companies in Southeast Asia that demonstrated "red flags" that were similar to Megaspeed.

Nvidia, Megaspeed and Alibaba did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Non-target

Lamarco first developed an interest in investing during his time as an undergraduate student studying finance at Grove City College, a small Christian liberal-arts school in Pennsylvania.

When Lamarco and another student placed second in a stock-pitch competition organized by Seeking Alpha, the college touted the accomplishment in a press release, noting that they had gone toe-to-toe with students from some of the best business schools in the country.

Lamarco said his decision to enter the competition was part of a broader effort to find a toehold in the investing industry despite attending a relatively small school that is not known for sending graduates to Wall Street.

"There's no hedge-fund recruiting [at Grove City], there's no investment-banking recruiting that really happens, so if you want to go into investing, you're going to have to find a creative way to do it," he said about his experience at Grove City.

Lamarco told MarketWatch that he would cold-email hedge funds with his investing research. That led to a role at a long-short fund based in Chicago after he finished school in late 2016, he said.

Two-and-a-half years later, Lamarco decamped for Pittsburgh, where he started Culper. Shadyside Partners, the name of Lamarco's LLC, is a reference to a neighborhood in the Steel City.

Culper Research, meanwhile, was named after the Culper Spy Ring, which was tasked by George Washington to report on the movements of British forces during the American Revolution. Lamarco's interest in the group was piqued after seeing a TV show about Culper's exploits.

"I'm not a Revolutionary War freak or anything like that," he told MarketWatch. "Although at 31, I guess I got to choose which war I'll be reading about for the rest of my life."

-Joseph Adinolfi

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11-09-26 1948ET