A little-known 31-year-old trader shorted Nvidia — it’s down around 27% since. Is his bet paying off?

Nvidia wasn’t the first company Culper has targeted. Since it was founded in 2019, it has turned its sights on several public companies, generally small-cap ones. It’s not afraid to make noise, though. One founder, for instance, hired Elon Musk’s attorney to sue for defamation after Culper alleged his company was tied to the Sinaloa drug cartel. The most recent target is Cerebras Systems, an AI hardware and supercomputer company, which labels the company “hot garbage.”

Assembling the report

The Culper report on Nvidia was many months in the making and had actually been shelved at one point, as the team didn’t feel it was worth their time.

But after officials at Super Micro Computer were charged with smuggling Nvidia chips into China, they reopened their investigation, speaking with former Nvidia employees, who speculated about the relationship between Nvidia’s Huang and Megaspeed’s Huang.

“Huang has not only vouched for Megaspeed, but seems to have quite literally walked alongside Megaspeed at every step, while maintaining an uncomfortably close relationship with Megaspeed’s Alice Huang, a Chinese national,” the report reads. “He was first spotted partying with Alice Huang in June 2024 – the same month the Apex/Alibaba pledge was filed. He then dined with Alice Huang in Taiwan in May 2025 – just weeks after the news of U.S. trade restrictions. … [One] Megaspeed employee characterized their relationship with Jensen as ‘very close’, corroborating another former Nvidia employee’s suggestion to us that many Nvidia employees wondered if there was a special relationship.”

Just under six months later, Huang is out and Nvidia has begun its search for a new leader.