Zero One Investment Research Daily Intelligence Brief, November 9, 2026

NVIDIA probe fuels calls to halt China sales as Washington doubts its own licenses

Top Market Signals

Huang probe fuels calls to halt China sales

NVIDIA (NVDA US) chief executive Jensen Huang admitted an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore data center company Megaspeed whom US intelligence considers a Chinese intelligence asset, and three Republican House committee chairs have asked him to a closed-door briefing on 18 Nov. That is the day after NVIDIA reports 3Q results, Commercial Times reported. Washington already suspects Megaspeed of helping Chinese buyers get around AI chip curbs, and our 7 Nov Blade reported about 600,000 H200 chips sitting in Hong Kong because Beijing has not approved large imports.

NVIDIA's board has set up a committee of independent directors with outside counsel to investigate. It said it has no reason so far to believe US national security or NVIDIA's trade secrets were compromised, and that Huang will keep running the company. Representative Michael McCaul called for an immediate pause on advanced AI chip exports to China until the facts are established, Liberty Times reported.

The same day, a New York Times investigation carried by Central News Agency questioned the licenses already granted. The Commerce Department has approved about 24 Chinese companies to buy or handle H200 chips, including Baidu, BYD and Tesla Shanghai. One approved server assembler, New Matrix, was set up 17 months ago, and the paper found an empty office at its address and shareholders linked to Wise Road Capital, which has been on the US Entity List since 2024. Commerce said it screens every application and fined exporters US$324m last year.

The pressure on those China sales now comes from Washington as well as Beijing. The 18 Nov briefing is the first point at which lawmakers can turn the calls for a pause into a request to Commerce.

Linked stocks: NVDA US, 2330 TT, 2382 TT

Quanta doubles sales as notebook shipments fall 36%

Quanta (2382 TT) reported October revenue of NT$353.25bn, up 104% YoY and a record for the month, while its notebook shipments fell 35.7% MoM to 2.7m units, Economic Daily News reported. Quanta said its view of AI server shipments is unchanged. Revenue for January to October reached NT$3.31tn, up 99.9%.

The other server assemblers posted the same pattern. Wistron (3231 TT) reported NT$402.6bn, up 118% YoY, DigiTimes said. ASUS (2357 TT) group revenue reached NT$107.62bn, up 62.25%, a monthly record helped by server shipments and delayed orders that were finally delivered. Compal (2324 TT) rose 40.8% YoY to NT$87.15bn and said 4Q PC shipments are slowing while servers keep growing.

Component suppliers grew more slowly. Delta Electronics (2308 TT) hit a record NT$74.67bn, up 30.1%, and power and components were 51% of the month. Asia Vital Components (3017 TT), which makes server cooling, rose 34.4% to NT$22.1bn, its fifth straight monthly record.

This follows Foxconn's October revenue of NT$1.30tn, up 45.73% YoY, in our 6 Nov Blade. Wiwynn (6669 TT) warned that tight raw material supply will make its monthly revenue swing. A month in which component shortages cut assembler shipments would show up first in these MoM figures.

Linked stocks: 2382 TT, 3231 TT, 2357 TT, 2308 TT

Google adds two TPUs, one hosted on AMD CPUs

Alphabet's (GOOGL US) Google Cloud added two systems to its eighth-generation TPU (tensor processing unit, Google's own AI chip) line on 9 Nov, bringing this year's launches to four. TPU 8tx pairs the TPU 8t chip with a custom AMD (AMD US) x86 processor so data and model weights stay encrypted and isolated while in use, aimed at regulated companies and governments.

TPU 8tx delivers 12.6 PFLOPs of FP4 compute with 216GB of HBM (high-bandwidth memory), Economic Daily News reported, and half the latency of the TPU 8t. TPU 8i Max puts two TPU 8i chips in one package, with 384GB of HBM (up 33%), 17.2TB/s of memory bandwidth and 768MB of on-chip SRAM, both doubled. It targets AI agents that hold very long contexts in memory.

Google builds each new system around chips it already makes, which is how it shipped four systems in a year instead of a new chip every two years. On software, its TorchTPU backend, built with Meta (META US), lets PyTorch code run on TPUs by adding two lines, according to Economic Daily News. That targets the cost of rewriting code that has kept customers on NVIDIA's CUDA software.

Linked stocks: GOOGL US, AMD US, NVDA US, META US

Phison locks most of its 2027 flash supply

Phison (8299 TT), a Taiwanese maker of controller chips for flash storage, has already secured more than 70% of its 2027 NAND flash supply target, CEO Khein-Seng Pua told DigiTimes. He expects AI demand in China to surge after the Lunar New Year, with high-capacity flash the tightest. He called the market's reading of Kioxia's roughly 1% QoQ guide as a demand slowdown "a joke" (translated from Chinese).

Transcend (2451 TT), a memory module maker, sees the other side of the same market. Chairman Chung-Won Shu said DRAM and NAND prices have held flat since 3Q26 and should stay on a plateau. DRAM remains short, while NAND supply is stable. As cheap inventory runs out, Transcend expects its gross margin to fall quarter by quarter toward normal.

Upstream, Samsung Electronics (005930 KS) and SK hynix (000660 KS) are competing for EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography tools after ASML (ASML NA) warned its planned capacity will fall short of demand in 2027 and 2028, DigiTimes reported. Flat prices with buyers locking supply a year ahead point to tight supply that has not yet turned into higher prices.

Linked stocks: 8299 TT, 2451 TT, 000660 KS, ASML NA

Anthropic buys 1.7GW of generators to skip queue

Anthropic agreed to spend US$3.4bn on 1.7GW of gas-fired generators for its AI data centers by taking over orders that Texas supplier OnePWR Solutions placed with Caterpillar (CAT US) about two years ago, Tom's Hardware reported. The deal, reached in late September, also covers engineering and construction.

Taking over existing orders lets Anthropic avoid joining the back of the line. Global turbine orders have passed 100GW against estimated manufacturing capacity of 60-70GW, and average US delivery times have reached six years, with some orders running into 2030 or 2031. Elon Musk's xAI already runs eight converted GE jet turbines at one site, up to 400MW in total.

Our 7 Nov Blade reported that a Texas governor-elect's pledge to pause data-center construction put about 13GW of projects at risk. On-site generation does not wait for a grid connection, but it still needs permits, and xAI's emissions permits are being challenged.

Linked stocks: CAT US, GEV US

Microsoft ends Oracle AI rental after Nscale pass

Microsoft (MSFT US) is phasing out an agreement to rent AI computing capacity from Oracle (ORCL US) after deciding not to renew the contract, DigiTimes reported. Bloomberg, as carried by Mobile World Live, said Microsoft is reassessing billions of US dollars of cloud partnerships. Oracle shares swung sharply on the report, MoneyDJ said.

Our 6 Nov Blade reported that Microsoft would not use an option to more than double the capacity it rents at Nscale's Texas data center. That makes two rented-capacity deals Microsoft has passed on within a week. The reports do not say whether the work moves to Microsoft's own data centers or is cut.

The companies that rent out AI capacity depend on a few large tenants. Microsoft's next capex guide would show whether it is building the capacity itself or spending less.

Linked stocks: MSFT US, ORCL US, CRWV US

先聲 First Word: Exclusives from Chinese-Language Sources

Tong Hsing pays a 129% premium for Singapore tester GTC

Tong Hsing (6271 TT), a Taiwanese chip packaging company, will buy Singapore-listed Global Testing Corporation for S$2.3 a share, a 129.31% premium to its one-month average price, about S$76.71m (NT$1.96bn) in total, and take it private. GTC, founded by Tong Hsing chairman Pierre Chen, adds wafer and final testing so Tong Hsing can sell packaging and testing together. (9 Nov 2026) Source: 同欣電擬砸近20億元 收購新加坡環邦科技、轉型封測一站式整合服務商

TSMC reportedly warns contractors over site safety

TSMC (2330 TT) has reportedly set up a task force on its construction suppliers after accidents at its Kaohsiung F22 and Baoshan sites, and contractors that do not improve could lose orders. TSMC has nearly 20 fabs under construction worldwide, so the people building them are now a limit on how fast it can expand. (9 Nov 2026) Source: 台積電強化整頓供應鏈 沒改善就掉單

BizLink says optical fiber shortage will continue

BizLink (3665 TT), a cable and connector maker, said optical fiber supply is tight and the shortage will last, with some large AI companies investing directly in fiber makers. AI work is now more than 30% of BizLink's revenue, up from single digits in 2015-2016, and its Southeast Asian plants have grown from two to 12. (9 Nov 2026) Source: 股市重挫無礙AI需求 貿聯鄧劍華：光纖供不應求還會持續