Democrats on Thursday launched an investigation into how the Trump administration handled Nvidia’s chip sales to China. The company fired CEO Jensen Huang early Thursday. He also agreed to testify before another Republican-led Congressional committee.
Huang was fired from the company he founded after confessing to an affair with a woman accused of being a Chinese spy. (He has since been accused of having further affairs with Nvidia employees.)
Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy, was an executive at Megaspeed, a NVIDIA customer. Megaspeed is based in Singapore and is suspected by US authorities of helping route advanced NVIDIA chips to China. The Democratic investigation is being led by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. As a minority party, we can ask questions, but we cannot force answers.
A harassing letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick asks the department to preserve records about arrangements it claims are questionable and illegal.
“The plan worked as follows,” the letter explains. President Trump has agreed to sell Nvidia’s H200 chips to China as long as the chips made in Taiwan are shipped to the United States first. After arriving, Trump added tariffs that “effectively took away a portion of Nvidia’s sales to China through an export tax regime that appears to be unconstitutional,” according to the letter. Subsequently, the Department of Commerce under Lutnick issued export licenses.
Incidentally, the revenue-sharing agreement between Trump and Nvidia has been made public. In August 2025, both NVIDIA and AMD agreed to share 15% of revenue from chip sales to China with the U.S. government as part of a deal to secure export licenses, the Associated Press reported at the time.
But the letter questions why Lutnick continued to allow MegaSpeed to buy chips, even though he was reportedly informed by U.S. intelligence about the relationship between Alice and Jensen Huang. Questions are why the ministry reportedly gave the green light to another Asian company “not physically present at the listed address” to purchase Nvidia chips. So the investigation targets the regime, not just Nvidia and Huang.
The letter also questions how Nvidia’s donations to Trump’s projects were factored in. The book notes that the export deal was approved after Trump learned of Hwang’s “compromising position” in sleeping with a suspected spy and after Nvidia donated $26 million to Trump’s projects, including a banquet hall. It appears to be asking whether President Trump used his knowledge of the incident to secure donations from Nvidia.
Interestingly, during a “60 Minutes” interview with President Trump that aired on Sunday, the president said that he and his team threatened to jail an unnamed AI executive, and that the executive has since “completely changed.”
This is the second Congressional investigation into Nvidia’s sales to China and its dealings with President Trump since news of the spying scandal broke. The Republican-led group includes leaders from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Intelligence Committee. The group is demanding that Hwang come and testify privately. They threatened to summon him if he did not voluntarily agree. On Thursday, after he resigned, he agreed.
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