TAIPEI — Prosecutors in the Taiwanese port city of Keelung have described a route. Fifty artificial-intelligence servers moved through Indonesia. Eight went by way of Japan. The rest were sent directly to China. A further fifty-six were stopped at Taiwan’s own border before they could leave.
Nine people have been indicted over those shipments, among them an employee of Nvidia’s Taiwan unit and two employees of Super Micro Computer’s Taiwan subsidiary. Eight face charges of breach of trust and document forgery. Three are charged with embezzlement.
Nvidia reports its quarterly results after Wednesday’s close in New York, and in the latest completed session the market was buying the stock, up 2.19 per cent to $213.05. The number everyone is waiting for is the $91 billion of revenue the company guided to three months ago. It is the wrong number.
The right one is in Nvidia’s own filing, and it is $4.55 billion. That is what customers headquartered in China bought from Nvidia in its most recent reported quarter, against $9.66 billion a year earlier. The legitimate China business has more than halved while the company as a whole grew 85 per cent, and the indictment filed in Keelung is a description of what has grown alongside it.
NVDA Stock Today: The Chip Complex Bounced
The previous session’s selling reversed almost exactly. Every large semiconductor name except Broadcom finished the latest session higher, and the hardest-hit names on Monday were the hardest-bought on Tuesday.
| Company | Close | Session | Week | Below 52-week high |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia (NVDA) | $213.05 | +2.19% | -3.04% | -9.9% |
| Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) | $479.18 | +4.91% | -1.08% | -18.1% |
| Micron Technology (MU) | $932.97 | +2.48% | -0.83% | -25.7% |
| Texas Instruments (TXN) | $260.05 | +0.43% | -4.48% | -22.1% |
| Intel (INTC) | $87.48 | +0.25% | -9.53% | -38.5% |
| Broadcom (AVGO) | $356.74 | -0.56% | -6.12% | -27.9% |
| Closing prices. The weekly change is measured Friday to Friday. Distance from the 52-week high is Eastern Herald’s calculation from the closing price. Note the column that has not recovered: every name here is still lower on the week, so the bounce retraced part of the previous session rather than undoing it. | ||||
AMD gained nearly 5 per cent, the largest move of the group, having fallen 3.49 per cent the session before. Nvidia fell $6.24 on Monday and recovered $4.57 on Tuesday, which is about three quarters of the decline. Nobody in this table is higher than they were a week ago.
The China Line in Nvidia’s Own Filing
In the quarterly report Nvidia filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the three months to April 26, the company breaks revenue down by where its customers are headquartered. The table is not the one that gets quoted.
| Customer headquarters | Q1 FY2027 ($m) | Q1 FY2026 ($m) | Change | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 63,769 | 25,685 | +148% | 78.1% |
| Taiwan | 12,006 | 7,648 | +57% | 14.7% |
| China (including Hong Kong) | 4,550 | 9,659 | -53% | 5.6% |
| Other | 1,290 | 1,070 | +21% | 1.6% |
| Total revenue | 81,615 | 44,062 | +85% | 100% |
| Figures in millions of US dollars as filed. Percentage changes and revenue shares are Eastern Herald’s calculation from the filed figures. Nvidia states that the end customer and shipping location may differ from the customer’s headquarters location, which is precisely the gap the Keelung indictment describes. China’s share of revenue fell from 21.9 per cent to 5.6 per cent in a single year, and sales to customers headquartered outside the United States fell from 42 per cent of revenue to 22. | ||||
Read those two columns together and the shape of the business has changed more than the growth rate suggests. Nvidia did not lose $5.1 billion of Chinese demand because Chinese buyers stopped wanting accelerators. It lost it because Washington made selling to them unlawful, and the filing says so at length: the company warns that unilateral and multilateral export controls have limited and could further limit the ability of downstream customers worldwide to acquire and deploy its products.
What the Indictment Actually Describes
The charges in Keelung are not American charges. Breaching United States export controls is not in itself a criminal offence under Taiwanese law, which is why prosecutors reached instead for breach of trust, document forgery and embezzlement, and why Taiwanese lawmakers have argued the statute needs changing. That legal gap is the substance of the story, more than the servers themselves.
Both companies responded. Nvidia said its employees have every incentive to work diligently with customers to ensure compliance with all applicable laws, and that it would help Taiwanese authorities resolve the allegations as quickly as possible. Super Micro said its own cooperation with those authorities led to the arrests, including of two former employees of its Taiwan subsidiary. Al Jazeera reported the indictment from statements by prosecutors and both companies.
Neither company is itself charged. What is alleged is that individuals inside their Taiwanese operations falsified documents to move controlled hardware, which is a different and smaller claim than corporate wrongdoing, and it is worth keeping those apart.
What Wednesday’s Number Will and Will Not Settle
Nvidia guided to $91.0 billion in revenue, plus or minus 2 per cent, and has not withdrawn that figure in the three months since. Revenue is therefore close to priced. What is not priced is gross margin, which slipped a tenth of a point sequentially in the last filing, from 75.0 per cent to 74.9, at a moment when Micron has contracted its entire 2026 high-bandwidth memory output on agreed price and volume and memory is the largest single input into an accelerator’s bill of materials.
The other unpriced thing is China. If Nvidia says nothing about the 5.6 per cent, the market will assume the figure is now structural. If it says the number can recover, that is a claim about American policy rather than about demand, and it is not Nvidia’s to make.
Our earlier column on Nvidia set out why the memory names being sold hardest are the ones with pricing power over it, and Broadcom’s custom-silicon business is the competitive answer that does not depend on Chinese demand at all. The S&P 500 rose 0.32 per cent in the same session.
Where Things Stand Before the Print
An hour after the closing bell there was no after-hours print in Nvidia, and the index futures had drifted slightly higher rather than giving the session back. Nasdaq 100 futures were quoted at 29,287.50 against a cash settlement of 29,209.23, and S&P 500 futures at 7,690.75 against 7,677.28.
The results land after Wednesday’s close, which means the first real repricing happens in that evening’s after-hours session, on a stock that has already taken back three quarters of Monday’s fall before seeing a single figure.
What This Column Cannot Tell You Yet
We do not know how many servers made it. Prosecutors have described fifty-eight shipments by two named transshipment routes, an unspecified number sent directly, and fifty-six units intercepted. That is a count of what was found. It is not a count of what moved, and the difference between those two figures is the entire question of whether export controls are working.
We also cannot say whether the collapse in declared China revenue is matched by a collapse in Chinese deployment. Nvidia reports where its customers are headquartered and states plainly that the end customer may be somewhere else. A Singapore or Taiwan headquarters with a mainland data centre appears in this table as Taiwan. Until somebody reconciles chips shipped against chips installed, the 5.6 per cent measures compliance paperwork rather than geography, and the indictment filed in Keelung is the first serious attempt anyone has made to measure the gap.
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