It is a document that no one paid attention to at the time of its publication, but which today takes a particular turn. On May 13, a small fund, Culper Research, published a 40-page memo explaining its distrust of the technology giant Nvidia. And this, because of a fragility summarized in the title of the study, and which has exploded in recent days: “NVIDIA (NVDA): the Chinese problem” (“NVIDIA (NVDA): The China Problem” in English).
At the time of publication, Jensen Huang, boss of the firm, landed in Beijing alongside Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The company's stock broke a record by gaining 3% the next day. No one then dwells on this fund which usually writes about unknown small caps. In its note, Culper Research justifies its choice to short sell Nvidia shares, which are the largest market capitalization in the world. This bet against the company is not a “bet against AI”, they write, but it would be motivated by suspicious and “significant” collusion between Nvidia and China.
Nothing Culper claims has been proven to date. But six months before the revelation of the extramarital relationship of the director of the firm with a woman suspected of being a spy for Beijing, the note, which went unnoticed, already described close links between the company and China. First, while Nvidia claims to no longer sell AI chips in China since the American restrictions of April 2025, Culper still estimates that more than 20% of these revenues remained driven by Chinese demand via intermediaries in Southeast Asia. It is even Megaspeed, a Singaporean company presented as the leading buyer of Nvidia chips in the region and targeted by investigations, which would be at the center of the system.
Nvidia defended its partner, certifying that it had no Chinese shareholders. A play on words, according to the fund, which does not exclude another form of Chinese financing. The documents unearthed by Culper suggest that Megaspeed was “secretly financed by Alibaba through a series of apparent shell companies,” the fund writes. Its balance sheet grew from $33 million to $3 billion in one year thanks to deposits of unspecified origin and its Malaysian subsidiary offered all of its assets, including servers, as collateral to a company owned by Alibaba in June 2024, according to records reviewed by Culper Research.
A proximity that was already disturbing
Another troubling point, the avant-garde note underlines a relationship “to say the least disturbing” between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, whom employees accuse of still managing Nvidia partner Megaspeed. The two were seen together during an evening in Taipei in June 2024, then at a dinner in Taiwan in May 2025. A Megaspeed employee also claims that the American visits their data centers at the same time as representatives from Alibaba. Former Nvidia employees even questioned the existence of a “special” relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang. However, Culper wasn't talking about an affair or spying, just a disturbing proximity. To date, Megaspeed denies any wrongdoing and has not been charged and Nvidia has always maintained that it has not observed any wrongdoing among its customers.
Behind this note is Christian Lamarco, 31, who launched alone in 2019 with two partners from Brooklyn, reports the Wall Street Journal. His fund is named after George Washington's famous spy network during the American Revolution, with Christian Lamarco seeing a resemblance in the nature of the work of the two entities. Concerning the note, the team initially gave up approaching Nvidia, doubting it would find solid information on the world's largest capitalization. The indictment in March of Supermicro officials, accused of smuggling servers to China, reignited their interest with interviews with former employees, Singaporean and Malaysian records, website source codes, and even a video shot in front of a Taiwanese noodle restaurant.
“Sometimes people are interested in what you say. Sometimes no,” the author soberly summarized to our American colleagues. Like any short seller, he gets rich when the stock falls. If Nvidia's has collapsed since last week, it refuses to say how much it has gained thanks to this head start on the market and even if it is still a seller.
