Howard Lutnick’s sons’ ties to NVIDIA revealed amid Jensen Huang’s Chinese spying scandal

Hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald in late September. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other executives at the semiconductor maker attended an investor conference in New York, according to a Kantar research report seen by CNBC.

Wall Street companies liked the story.

“We continue to view NVDA as the best risk/reward in our coverage,” Kantar analyst CJ Muse and colleagues wrote in a research note dated Oct. 3, maintaining an Overweight rating on the stock with a price target of $350.

But the company, formerly run by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and now led by his sons Brandon and Kyle, reported a nearly 50% decline in the number of Nvidia shares it owned from September 2025 to March 2026, according to a CNBC analysis of its securities filings, excluding options. Nvidia was one of the largest stock positions reported in Kantar’s filing.

The decline coincided with pressure from the White House and U.S. intelligence officials on Mr. Lutnick to crack down on MegaSpeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of leaking Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips to China. According to Axios, Lutnick repeatedly resisted these efforts.

By the time Kanter hosted Huang in New York, Lutnick had also been alerted to classified information about Huang’s ties to suspected Chinese spies and had attended the G20 technology summit in North Carolina alongside the CEO, according to Axios.

Even as Cantor shed his Nvidia stake, he continued to do business across the chipmaker’s AI empire. A CNBC review of securities filings, company announcements and Wall Street research found that the company has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia’s business partners while maintaining close relationships with the chipmaker’s executives.

Those relationships have received renewed attention after Huang’s resignation on Thursday and Axios’ report that Lutnick repeatedly resisted crackdowns on companies suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips into China, even though President Donald Trump approved a third new export ban on those companies on Nov. 5.

Ethics experts said the secretary’s knowledge of Nvidia could raise questions about Lutnick’s ties to his former investments in the company.

Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush and now a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota, said there was “no evidence” that Lutnick shared nonpublic information with Cantor Fitzgerald, but “it doesn’t look good.”

“The conversations I have with my sons should be about information that is publicly available,” Painter told CNBC.

There is no evidence that Mr. Lutnick’s sons had advance knowledge of the intelligence concerns, no evidence that changes in Kantar’s reported holdings were coupled with any warnings, and no evidence that the company’s business interests influenced their father’s decisions.

A Kantar spokesperson told CNBC: “In the past, Kantar has only occasionally held non-material, independent proprietary positions in Nvidia, as distinct from the positions reflected in 13F filings entered into in the ordinary course of business in connection with customer exchange transactions common in the institutional market.”

Kanter declined to answer CNBC’s other questions. The Commerce Department, the White House, and Howard Lutnick and his sons did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment or detailed questions about the findings.

Cantor Chairman Brandon Lutnick has publicly praised the chipmaker’s leadership amid increased scrutiny of Mr. Huang. “NVIDIA is one of the great companies on the planet and has a great leadership team,” Brandon Lutnick told Fox Business on Wednesday.

Trump is siding with Howard Lutnick. A White House official told Reuters on Thursday that the president maintains “full confidence” in the commerce secretary.

But on Friday, a rift appeared in the administration’s cohesion when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the Treasury, Defense, State, and U.S. Trade Representatives had all “been in favor of putting MegaSpeed ​​on the Entity List for months.”

Bessent cited the Department of Commerce as the department responsible for imposing an entity list that identifies restricted companies and other groups, adding, “You’d have to ask the Department about their internal processes.”

Before Howard Lutnick left Wall Street to become Secretary of Commerce in February 2025, Nvidia was Kantar’s second-largest reporting stock position, behind only Bitcoin investor MicroStrategy. strategy. The company disclosed more than 3.5 million shares of Nvidia stock valued at $479 million at the end of 2024, according to its quarterly securities filing.

Its shares remained flat through September 2025, but its value rose 36% to $652 million as the Trump administration moved over the summer to loosen restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 chip sales to China, according to Kantar’s quarterly securities report.

But over the next six months, the number of NVIDIA shares Kantar reported owning fell by 49%, from 3 million shares in December to 1.78 million shares at the end of March 2026, and their value fell from $652 million to $310 million, according to a CNBC analysis of securities filings.

Pressure was also mounting on Howard Lutnick on Capitol Hill. In March, Sen. Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, asked the Secretary to suspend or reconsider Nvidia’s export licenses, citing the involvement of three Nvidia customers. super microcomputer He was charged with conspiring to smuggle AI chips to China.

Painter stressed that there is no evidence that Howard Lutnick shared such information with his sons, but said, “I think the Trump administration is sieving through non-public government information and passing it on to various hedge fund people.”

The filing did not say why Kantar’s reported share count decreased or whether its overall financial exposure to NVIDIA decreased. Nvidia’s stock price had more than doubled from its April 2025 low by late October, but it has since fallen in the months since. The stock price fell about 6.5% from the end of September to the end of March.

Cantor’s reported Nvidia holdings remained near that low level at 1.81 million shares through June 30, the most recent quarter covered. The next quarterly filing is scheduled for Monday.

Mr. Cantor has not publicly explained the decline.

Most of those shares belonged to CF Secured, a Cantor Securities subsidiary that uses stocks and derivatives to hedge customer transactions, according to audited financial statements. Kanter also disclosed significant positions in NVIDIA options during the period investigated by CNBC, but they were overwhelmingly skewed toward put options, which can protect stocks from falling.

In May, amid growing concerns about Huang within the Trump administration, a securities filing revealed that Kanter had helped finance the expansion of one of Nvidia’s new business partners, according to Axios.

On May 7, Nvidia and the Australian-based cloud computing provider Airen announced a five-year, $3.4 billion cloud computing agreement and strategic partnership that gives the chipmaker the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN.

“This is not a passive financial investment. NVIDIA is a partner who wins when we deliver results,” IREN co-CEO Daniel Roberts told investors on the company’s quarterly earnings call today.

Five days later, as President Trump flew to China on Air Force One, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned him about Hwang’s ties to suspected Chinese spies, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. Hwang was not originally invited on the trip, but joined the presidential delegation during a refueling stop in Alaska.

Axios reported that Howard Lutnick had already been sent a confidential information memo detailing concerns about his relationship with Hwang.

On May 12, the day President Trump departed for China, IREN announced the price of its convertible debt offering, ultimately raising $3 billion when the deal closed two days later. Mr. Cantor was one of seven bookrunners on the deal, along with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs.

On May 14, the day the recruitment closed, Mr. Lutnick’s Commerce Department quietly authorized about 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to buy Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips, although some of the approvals predated the intelligence memo.

It is unclear when IREN hired Kanter for this offer or how much the company made from the deal. Kanter declined to answer CNBC’s questions about his work with IREN.

Still, Cantor reported a sizable position in IREN stock.

By the end of June, Kantar reported $115 million in IREN stock and $362 million in Nvidia stock. Together, the companies accounted for more than 9% of Kantar’s reported $5.2 billion in securities holdings, excluding options, according to a CNBC analysis of filings.

Kanter did not respond to CNBC’s questions about his work with IREN.

IREN wasn’t the only company to jump into Nvidia’s orbit and turn to Cantor for funding.

In October 2025, Kantar advised AI infrastructure developer Lancium on a $600 million financing agreement to support a data center campus in Abilene, Texas, the first location for Stargate, a large-scale AI infrastructure project backed by OpenAI. Softbank and oracle.

Cantor’s commercial real estate firm Newmark also helped finance the Abilene campus, arranging a $7.1 billion construction loan in May 2025.

Ten months later, NVIDIA agreed to invest $2 billion for a roughly 20% stake in Lancium, with up to another $1 billion tied to future milestones, The Information reported in August. Rancium, which is also backed by Blackstone, confirmed the investment and technology partnership on August 24, without disclosing financial terms.

It’s unclear whether Cantor continued to advise Lancium after the funding deal or whether he played a role in Nvidia’s investment. Neither Mr. Kanter nor Mr. Rancium responded to questions about the investment.

The relationship with Kantar reportedly extends to Nvidia’s supply chain as well.

In May 2025, days after Howard Lutnick announced he would transfer ownership of Cantor to his children through a trust, Semaphore reported that the company’s bankers were privately advising executives. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.which manufactures Nvidia’s most advanced chips on Navigate Washington. Cantor criticized Semafor’s report as “baseless and false.”

TSMC received billions of dollars in federal grants that were created during the Biden administration and administered by the Department of Commerce to fund U.S. manufacturing expansion.

Democratic senators in December called for an ethics investigation into whether the Lutnicks stand to benefit from his push to expand AI data centers.

And on Wednesday, Sens. Warren and Chris Coons, D-Delaware, demanded that Howard Lutnick, Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller preserve records about Nvidia’s chip exports to China and intelligence warnings about Huang.

The senators questioned whether “smart defense counterintelligence was conducted or whether national security recommendations were overridden.”

“I think the Trump administration’s biggest failure here was convincing Jensen Huang and others to allow some advanced chips to be exported,” Coons said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” accusing the Trump administration of turning a blind eye to the black market for more advanced chips.