Culper's Nvidia Short Call Was Just the Start, Founder Says

Nvidia shares have fallen more than 20% since Culper Research published its short report in May 2026 — a call that presaged the scandal now engulfing CEO Jensen Huang. Christian Lamarco, the 31-year-old founder of the two-analyst research shop, says the story is bigger than one company.

What did Culper allege in May?

When the report appeared, Nvidia stock traded near a record high and Huang was preparing to accompany President Donald Trump on a trip to Beijing. Lamarco argued that Nvidia's China business had not "gone to zero," as the company claimed, after the U.S. banned the sale of its most advanced chips to China. The business had changed shape instead.

Lamarco claimed Chinese companies were still finding ways to receive Nvidia GPUs directly, or to access data centers in countries such as Malaysia that run advanced Nvidia semiconductors. He also described an "uncomfortably close relationship" between Huang and Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed, a major Nvidia chip buyer in Southeast Asia.

Six months later, over this past weekend, Huang acknowledged an affair with the former Megaspeed executive, who is not related to him. The admission followed late-October reporting in 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.

The takeaway: a three-person shop flagged a national-security issue at America's most valuable chipmaker months before the board saw it.

Is Megaspeed the only channel?

Lamarco says no. In the course of the investigation, Culper found potential circumstantial evidence linking Nvidia to at least six other companies in Southeast Asia showing "red flags" similar to Megaspeed's. The original report cited a former high-level Nvidia employee who called the Megaspeed relationship "the tip of the iceberg."

Culper's big reveal came from financial digging: through various subsidiaries and shell companies, the firm appeared to link Megaspeed with a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. That connection, however, rests on circumstantial evidence, and Lamarco has not named the six additional companies publicly. Nvidia, Megaspeed and Alibaba did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Lamarco was not alone in being early. The New York Times and Bloomberg News had reported on Nvidia's relationship with Singapore-based Megaspeed more than a year ago. What caught his attention was a contradiction: Nvidia claimed its China business had collapsed after export restrictions, while its sales to Southeast Asian entities were booming. "Those two details seemed to conflict," he said.

How has the bet played out?

The stock dropped more than 4% in Monday's session alone, according to FactSet data. Lamarco would not say whether Culper is still short Nvidia, or how much money the firm made. "We put out the work we put out," he told MarketWatch. "We were confident in the research initially, and we're still confident in it now."

Culper invests its own money and works with partners who pay a percentage of winnings from Culper-inspired short bets — a model several industry insiders describe as common among activist short sellers. The firm has published roughly 40 short reports since 2019, with a solid record of wins and a handful of losses. Lamarco has previously faced court battles involving celebrity attorney Alex Spiro and once challenged late-night host Jimmy Fallon to a $1 million bet.

Who is Christian Lamarco?

Lamarco studied finance at Grove City College, a small Christian liberal-arts school in Pennsylvania that lacks Wall Street recruiting pipelines. "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.

He cold-emailed hedge funds with his research, landed a role at a Chicago long-short fund after graduating in late 2016, and founded Culper in Pittsburgh two-and-a-half years later. The firm is named after the Culper Spy Ring, which George Washington tasked with tracking British forces during the Revolutionary Revolution-era conflict. "I'm not a Revolutionary War freak or anything like that," Lamarco said. "Although at 31, I guess I got to choose which war I'll be reading about for the rest of my life."

Whether the board's independent investigation corroborates Culper's broader claims about six more companies will determine if this short call becomes a landmark — or a lucky strike.