Recent revelations about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s links to a suspected Chinese spy have shocked investors, with the chipmaker’s valuation sinking $450 billion over two days.
But the relationship, now under investigation by Nvidia, was foreshadowed in May by a little-known Wall Street “short seller,” Christian Lamarco of New York City-based Culper Research, who published a 40-page report highlighting Huang’s ties to Alice Huang (no relation), a former television reporter and financial industry executive.
Short-sellers use a trading strategy that yields profits when a company’s shares decline, and Culper disclosed in its report that it had bet against Nvidia’s stock. Short-sellers often publish research to demonstrate why a company is overvalued, aiming to convince other investors to sell the stock, thereby driving the shares lower and boosting their profits.
Lamarco, who didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, based his report on Nvidia on interviews with employees of Chinese companies, Singaporean and Malaysian corporate filings, and social media posts that appeared to show Jensen Huang and Alice Huang socializing together at various events.
The report also outlined Culper’s rationale for claiming that Nvidia’s high-powered chips were being diverted to China, despite the U.S. barring the sale of such products to the People’s Republic due to national security and competitive concerns.
Key to Lamarco’s investigation were the actions of Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based company that has emerged as a major player in the Nvidia scandal. Alice Huang, then a top executive at Megaspeed, is suspected by U.S. intelligence of being an asset of China’s Ministry of State Security.
“Uncomfortably close”
Lamarco wrote in the report that Jensen Huang appeared to have an “uncomfortably close relationship” with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le.
“We believe Nvidia has a significant China problem,” Culper Research wrote in a May 13 social media thread. “Nvidia claims its China business went to ‘zero’ after April 2025 U.S. trade restrictions. We believe that in reality, over 20% of Nvidia’s FY 2026 compute revenues remained driven by China via illegal GPU diversion and Southeast Asian intermediaries.”
Culper also alleged that Chinese companies used Southeast Asian intermediaries to gain access to Nvidia chips. The firm said corporate filings suggest that one of those intermediaries — Megaspeed — received financing from Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba to buy the chips.
Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Culper isn’t the first to question whether China was using front companies to buy advanced AI chips from the U.S. In a March 23 letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks warned of a “large-scale diversion of advanced American AI chips to China through Southeast Asian intermediaries.”
The lawmakers requested that the Commerce Department immediately suspend active export licenses for Nvidia AI chips and servers to China and to companies in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.
Megaspeed’s mega-speedy growth
Culper’s report notes that Megaspeed had “relatively few assets at year-end 2023,” but within a year spent $2.9 billion to purchase Nvidia-powered servers. The short-seller said it found documents that showed the Chinese tech giant Alibaba had provided billions to Megaspeed.
Megaspeed and its Malaysian affiliate, Speedmatrix, together purchased $4.8 billion of Nvidia’s advanced AI equipment and processors over the last three years, according to the report.
“Megaspeed went from very little business to billions in a rapid time frame,” Culper stated. “This is the exact sort of pattern that experts told us ought to raise alarm bells at Nvidia as indicative of diversion or circumvention activity.”
While the firm’s research didn’t directly refer to a romantic relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, it included several photos and video stills showing them together at various events.
“Nvidia CEO Huang has walked alongside Megaspeed at every step, and seems to have a close relationship with Megaspeed’s Alice Huang,” Culper wrote in the May 13 social media thread. “They partied together in June 2024 — same month as the Apex/Alibaba pledge, then dined together in May 2025 — just after U.S. trade restrictions.”
Culper, which is named after the American Revolution-era Culper Spy Ring that reported on the movement of British forces, has in recent days posted about the allegations that emerged this week about Jensen Huang’s ties to Megaspeed and Alice Huang. “We wrote about this in May,” the group noted on Nov. 5.
When Culper published its report on May 13, Nvidia’s stock was trading at $225.83 per share. Between that date and the close of trading on Tuesday, the shares have shed 25% of their value.
“Everyone was just mocking us, and now everyone is singing our praises,” Lamarco told the New York Times in a recent interview.
