‘this Is A Serious National Security Issue.’ Gop Bucks Trump On Nvidia

Senior Republican lawmakers are considering investigating Nvidia over CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy, putting President Donald Trump’s strong defense of the tech titan at odds with mounting scrutiny from members of his own party.

GOP chairs of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and China committees are asking Huang to appear at a closed-door briefing next week that could lay the groundwork for an investigation into Nvidia. Other Republicans are now calling for Congress or other federal authorities to launch probes into Huang’s conduct and Nvidia’s broader dealings with China.

House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) told reporters “we need to do an investigation” through the “proper authorities,” while outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Huang should be broadly investigated and Congress should “absolutely” have a role in probing him.

Russ Walker, an adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign and executive director of the conservative Humans First group, said he’s encouraging GOP lawmakers and the Justice Department to investigate Huang as well as the White House to bar him from its premises.

“I don’t think I’m alone in this,” Walker told POLITICO. “This is a serious national security issue, and I think there will be Republicans that step up. There's going to be a lot of Democrats that step up, of course.”

The discussions, which follow Democrats’ midterms sweep and coming majorities in Congress, show how the Nvidia scandal has given Washington’s most hawkish Republicans a new opening to buck Trump on China. Several are leaning into Huang’s affair to revive long-held policy goals that clash with Trump’s laissez-faire approach, arguing that loosened restrictions on advanced chip sales are a national security risk.

The scandal also has strengthened the case for some tech companies that favor stronger export controls in their claim that Nvidia and other chip firms cannot be trusted to decide where their products are sold. Instead, three people involved in the closed-door negotiations regarding the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act said some tech lobbyists have used the news to argue the government must assume a heavier hand in deciding who can access chips. They were granted anonymity to disclose details of private discussions.

Republican Sen. Jim Banks (Ind.), who sits on the Armed Services and Banking committees, said he and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also want an investigation into the recent Huang reports. Warren is poised to chair Senate Banking next year.

The chair of the House Select Committee on China, John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), said Nvidia has “credibility issues” that warrant further scrutiny.

“It’s important that we get to the truth and to the facts,” Moolenaar said. “One has to wonder what kind of influence they were getting.”

If lawmakers move forward, a probe would escalate Republicans’ response to the revelations about Huang’s affair, which members of both parties have so far largely seized on to push export control legislation during the lame duck.

Capitol Hill staffers are already discussing the direction lawmakers could take a possible probe of Nvidia, and which jurisdictions such an investigation would fall within, according to a lobbyist from an AI policy group and another from the tech sector.

Some Republican congressional staffers are “trying to figure out how to approach it in a way that doesn't get distracted from sort of the salacious part of the story and more on the substantive part,” said the first lobbyist, who was granted anonymity to share details of these private discussions.

Nvidia didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The allegations also exposed rifts among top Trump advisers. The administration has been divided on its approach to China, particularly over American AI chip exports, with senior officials at the State Department like Secretary Marco Rubio aligning with the GOP’s hawkish bloc while other advisers like former AI czar David Sacks steered Trump toward his more lenient, tech-friendly stance.

“This divide has been so pronounced in this second term,” said a former Trump official in the first administration who worked on chips and export controls. “Jensen's involvement with a possible Chinese asset severely compromises the most visible champion for [Sacks’] side: the CEO that was essential to making the argument.”

For many Democrats and Republicans, further restricting chip exports through the annual defense bill has emerged as the most immediate policy response to the Huang issue. Lawmakers from Warren and Banks to Sens. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) and Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) — members of Senate Banking, which has jurisdiction over export controls —all referenced the scandal in urging Congress to pass various chip restrictions on Monday.

“The administration is largely supportive of it, and my hope is that [the AI] Overwatch [Act] and other strong export control measures are passed in the NDAA,” Banks said, referring to a bipartisan Senate proposal that would let Congress review licenses to sell advanced AI chips to China and other countries of concern.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is poised to be speaker in the next Congress, told reporters Monday that he’s “going to work hard to make sure” provisions in the Senate’s version of the annual defense policy bill that tighten Chinese access to advanced chips make it into the final NDAA.

“We're obviously trying to get more information right now about exactly the nature of that relationship and the connections that come with it, so it's something that we’re further examining,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday. “We want to be responding in a serious way to any big threat to America's national security interest.”

Brian Mast, the GOP House Foreign Affairs chair, left the door open to subpoenaing Huang to ensure his participation in the Nov. 18 closed-door briefing, telling reporters, “I've done everything that I need for the last 20 months to do it if I want to.”

Others suggested it will take more convincing, the kind that could only emerge from an outside examination of the facts.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) didn’t say Monday whether he would support a Senate investigation, telling POLITICO, “I have not had any classified information on it.” He added that he doesn’t expect additional details to come from the administration. “I think we'll work it through Senate Intel.”

Within the Trump administration, Nvidia remains a sensitive issue, and the decision by the company’s board this weekend to investigate its CEO is poised to deepen internal divides as Trump and other administration officials downplay concerns about Huang’s behavior.

Some administration officials warned the episode could have more lasting repercussions for Nvidia’s standing in Washington.

“I suspect this hurts Nvidia more domestically,” said one senior administration official granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Policymakers in D.C. who already had concerns or were on the fence about Nvidia’s lobbying for exporting AI chips will likely want a lot more scrutiny of Jensen and Nvidia.”

The FBI declined to comment on whether they're investigating Huang’s affair with the suspected Chinese spy, and the White House referred to Trump’s remarks Monday.

Trump said he checked in with Huang on Monday and believed that the CEO didn’t know the woman was an alleged Chinese spy. The president added that the “FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he’ll be in good shape.”

Staff at the Bureau of Industry and Security, an office within the Commerce Department that oversees U.S. tech exports, had flagged the risk of Nvidia’s advanced chips being diverted to China in “dozens” of reports over recent months. But those warnings have not led to intervention or new restrictions on the company “in a meaningful capacity,” according to a person familiar with the matter granted anonymity to discuss it.

Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who until recently was an executive for Singaporean data center company Megaspeed, has been reported as the woman involved with Huang. The Commerce Department had been looking into Megaspeed, but its investigation was halted last year, and the Justice Department continued its investigation, said a second person familiar with the matter.

Senior Commerce officials, including Jeffrey Kessler, who leads Commerce’ BIS unit, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have rebuffed requests from junior staff to pursue the issue and to take on Nvidia and its network of companies, according to the first person.

“BIS conducts all enforcement strictly by the book. BIS enforces aggressively across the board, including with respect to chip smuggling, and enforcement is at an all-time high,” BIS spokesperson Thomas Wackman said, pointing to a list of enforcement actions taken against Nvidia. He referenced six investigations that resulted in criminal charges against defendants involved in chip smuggling.

Commerce’s apparent failure to act on the warnings has also been a source of finger-pointing and is prompting some to press for congressional scrutiny into what department officials had been aware of.

“Commerce certainly hasn’t been attentive and aggressive enough on export controls,” said Liza Tobin, who served as National Security Council director for China during the first Trump administration. “There are unanswered questions about chip diversion, what did Nvidia know, when and what did they do about it. Those should really be the focus of Congress’s attention.”

Megan Messerly, Phelim Kine, Kelsey Brugger, Jordain Carney and Jasper Goodman contributed to this story.