Thursday, November 12, 2026

Nvidia: The Story, Public in May, Priced in November

 From Staff

A short seller published the Nvidia story five months before it cost shareholders a third of the company. He was mocked, warned and ignored. The facts did not change. The narrator did.

SINGAPORE, November 12 Nvidia's market value was on course to drop below $4 trillion on Thursday for the first time since July 2025, after Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive and as a member of the board. The stock fell 7.8% in premarket trading. It has lost roughly $300 billion since the board announced an investigation on Sunday. Bernstein cut its price target in half, from $400 to $200, on the morning of the resignation. Shares had already fallen more than 30% from a record of about $243 on October 6.

The trigger was not new information about Nvidia's business. It was the same information, repeated by someone with a masthead.

On May 13, at 2:04 in the afternoon, Culper Research posted the first of seventeen messages on X. Culper is a small New York firm run by Christian LaMarco, then 31. Its name comes from George Washington's Revolutionary War spy ring.

The first post read: "NEW: We are short Nvidia $NVDA. We believe Nvidia has a significant China problem." A forty page report followed. By the ninth post, Culper had named Alice Huang, an executive at a Singapore cloud company called Megaspeed. And said Nvidia's chief executive "seems to have a close relationship" with her.

The market shrugged. Nvidia closed that day at $225.83, up 2.3%. It set a record close of $235.74 the next day. Between August 27 and October 13 it closed above the report day level on seventeen separate sessions. On October 6 it reached $239.24. One widely followed markets commentator wrote that afternoon that it was "impossible to overstate how little the market cares."

LaMarco was flooded with messages disparaging him and warning him to be careful. An August 6 article crediting his call was an outlier nobody read.

On October 29 the New York Times reported that American officials had concluded Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence asset, that surveillance of her had revealed a close relationship with Nvidia's chief executive. President Trump had been briefed about a year earlier and chose not to act. Nvidia closed that day at $213.66 and has not closed higher since.

Almost nothing in that story was new about Megaspeed. The anomalous spending, the Alibaba money, the concentration of China revenue through Southeast Asian intermediaries, the existence of Alice Huang and her relationship with Huang were all in the May report. What was new was provenance. A short seller could allege a relationship. Only the government could certify espionage, describe surveillance, and confirm that the President knew.

The Times also reported that the intelligence memo had circulated among top policymakers last spring, the same season Culper published. The same information existed in two places at once. One was a free public document that got its author harassed. The other was classified.

The rest followed in a cascade. On November 8 the board announced an independent investigation and Huang admitted the affair in an internal memo. On November 9 three House committee chairs demanded a closed briefing and the Times reported that a Commerce Department inquiry into Megaspeed had moved to the Justice Department as a criminal matter. On November 11 the Times reported a second relationship, with an Nvidia executive. On November 12 the Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to remove him. He resigned.

Four hours before the resignation, an anonymous wallet began selling.

The address, 0x30afce2f6842bf183c7e3fe7162e279ff0b6393e, opened a short of about $3.16 million in Nvidia perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives exchange. The entry was not one order but a taker sweep across at least ten clips between 4:58:38 and 4:59:42 in the afternoon, from $170.04 down to $169.00, with a single $658,000 clip in the middle. Average entry: $169.57.

The timing is the story. The Times published at 4:57. The wallet began selling at 4:58. The Journal published at 5:28. The contract gapped to $156.14.

The position was five times levered and isolated, with a liquidation price of $198.64 and a full cover trigger set at $167. Unrealized profit stood at about $133,800 at the time of publication and had grown to roughly $161,800 as the contract drifted toward $160.90. Margin posted was about $600,000.

The account's ninety day record before the trade was a loss of about $706,839. It was first seen on chain roughly six days earlier. Four and a half hours before opening the short, it had closed a CoreWeave long for about $97,900 in profit.

It was not alone. A wallet beginning 0xc3ed opened a $5.44 million short at ten times leverage with an average entry of $181.33, filled over ninety minutes beginning two and a half hours after Huang's memo went live on a Sunday while the Nasdaq was shut. Three separate wallets opened more than $9.1 million in leveraged shorts that same Sunday afternoon. Cumulative Nvidia perpetual volume across exchanges reached a record above $4 billion. On Polymarket, the contract asking whether Huang would depart before year end jumped from 26.5% to 77% in five minutes and peaked at 92.5%.

By ORTEX's estimate, Nvidia short sellers were carrying about $3.8 billion in paper profit before the resignation, a figure that swells toward $6.8 billion at $163.

The company at the centre of it all was built in three years. Megaspeed began in 2015 as 7Road International, a Chinese gaming firm with ties to investors backed by the state. It took its current name in March 2023, the same year Alice Huang joined. She served as managing director for eight months and received one share for one Singapore dollar on the day she stepped down.

Ownership passed in November 2023 to Swiftdata, a Singapore entity controlled by Tan Yong Pong, who became sole director. Total assets went from $75 in 2022 to $33 million in 2023 to roughly $3 billion in 2024. By late 2025 Megaspeed was the largest buyer of Nvidia chips in Southeast Asia.

Its model offered two routes to restricted silicon. The first is legal: rent out compute from chips housed in data centers in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, including at Sedenak Tech Park in Johor, to customers in China. Export controls govern the movement of hardware, not the rental of time on hardware that never moves. The second route is the alleged crime: buy chips through front companies and ship them into China.

According to the Times, Megaspeed's Malaysian subsidiary Speedmatrix received more than 200 shipments of restricted Nvidia technology between June 2024 and June 2025. Those chips allegedly powered data centers built by Shanghai Century Litong, a Chinese firm where Alice Huang's younger sister, Huang Yu, is a founding shareholder, which then supplies Alibaba and Tencent inside China. Customs records show Megaspeed brought at least $4.6 billion of Nvidia hardware into the region by November 2025, including at least 136,000 GPUs, among them Blackwell parts the United States had at times barred for China.

The calendar mattered too. Megaspeed completed a bulk purchase in the six weeks before May 15, 2025, the deadline when a Biden era rule would have required permits for chip exports to Southeast Asia.

The money trail is the part with documents. Apex Enterprise Solutions, a Singapore company owned by Alibaba, took a security interest over Speedmatrix's equipment, network gear and intellectual property under an agreement dated June 18, 2024. Malaysian corporate records show it still active on November 11, 2026. Culper reported that Apex's financial statements showed more than $4.1 billion in prepayments and about $4.2 billion in loans payable to Alibaba as of March 31, 2025. What has never been confirmed is that Alibaba directly financed the chip purchases. That claim rests on the security interest, the balance sheet figures and one anonymous employee quoted in the May report.

Megaspeed became an official Nvidia Cloud Partner, a status granted by invitation that opens procurement at the frontier of the company's product line. Nvidia visited Megaspeed's sites on multiple occasions and said it found no reason to believe products had been diverted. It also said the company was owned and operated outside China with no Chinese shareholders, a claim that sits awkwardly beside the company's origin.

Then, according to the Times, a top Nvidia executive contacted the Commerce Department. A months long investigation that was deep into its work was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department late last year. Meanwhile Huang was cultivating ties with the President and advocating for relaxed chip export controls to China, the exact policy question his alleged asset was reportedly tasked with influencing.

Megaspeed denies wrongdoing and points to inspections by the Bureau of Industry and Security, Malaysia's trade ministry and Nvidia that found no violations. Beijing rejects the reporting. Singapore says it never investigated Alice Huang but confirms a criminal probe into server shipments is ongoing, and has barred her from reentering the country. Malaysian customs seized $12.1 million in servers in October that had been falsely declared as electronic components.

Congress only moved to close the remote access gap in January 2026, roughly eighteen months after the shipments had landed.

Members of Congress were never bystanders. Nvidia sits at the intersection of export controls, the $52 billion CHIPS Act and AI regulation, three areas where committees receive briefings the public does not.

The disclosure regime requires a trade be reported within 45 days, after the move has happened. The standard penalty for a late filing is $200. In the House a first late report costs $200 no matter how many trades it bundles. Tom Malinowski reportedly paid a single $200 fine after failing to timely report hundreds of trades worth at least $671,000. Pat Fallon paid $600 after filing 122 late transactions worth between $9 million and $21 million. In fourteen years, no member has been prosecuted by the Justice Department for violating the Act. The two former members who went to prison over stock trades were charged under securities fraud law.

The Nvidia receipts are on the public file. Cleo Fields bought $4 million in the stock in the spring of 2025, before the July chip export deal with China. Josh Gottheimer bought on June 24, 2025, ahead of the same policy shift. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought on April 9, 2025, days before a tariff pause rallied semiconductors. Daniel Meuser filed five partial sales 36 days after execution. Sara Jacobs sold up to $1 million in Qualcomm while sitting on Armed Services and Foreign Affairs. The Pelosi household recorded fifteen Nvidia trades worth between $10 million and $44 million, and its portfolio beat the S&P 500 by 46 points in 2024.

An analysis of disclosed trades found that 56%, or 6,170 of 11,016 purchases over sixteen months, were in industries the same members were about to vote on.

The House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act on July 22, 2026, by 232 to 198, barring members, spouses and dependent children from buying individual stocks. The Senate killed it on September 30 by 53 to 47, seven votes short of the sixty needed. The objections were that it grandfathered existing holdings and that it should have covered the President as well.

Between October 29 and November 12, Nvidia fell about 25%. Somebody was on the other side of that move. Somebody always is.

The well positioned exited between $213 and $239. The anonymous crowd collected within sixty seconds of a headline. The analysts arrived after the drawdown with a target cut to a price the stock had already reached. The board bought itself five months to run an inquiry staffed by counsel it chose. Its chief executive got to resign rather than be fired, with a successor named and a first ever chair installed.

And the public got the story on November 12, at $160.

The five months were not a slow news cycle. They were a settlement window, during which the information was free, public and correct. The only thing standing between it and a price was permission.

Culper's record before this made the point sharper. Across 49 campaigns since 2018, its targets fell an average of 6.7% on the day a report came out, roughly double the average across all reports tracked. He is good at this. It did not matter. Against a company of this size, a correct call with no institutional amplifier is invisible until someone with a printing press repeats it.

The system did not fail to notice him. It noticed him immediately, decided he was radioactive, and let the people who mattered get out first.


Sources:

The May Report and the Market Reaction

The Certification and the Cascade

The Anonymous Trades and On Chain Data

Megaspeed, Alibaba and Beijing

The Regulator Who Got a Phone Call

Congress and the STOCK Act

The Burry Position



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Nvidia: The Story, Public in May, Priced in November

 From Staff A short seller published the Nvidia story five months before it cost shareholders a third of the company. He was mocked, warned ...