Democrats on Thursday opened an inquiry into how the Trump administration handled Nvidia’s chip sales to China. Earlier on Thursday, the company ousted its CEO Jensen Huang. He also agreed to testify to a different set of Republican-led Congressional committees.
Huang was removed from the company he founded after he confessed to an extramarital affair amid reports of a relationship with a woman accused of being a Chinese spy. (He has since been accused of having more affairs, with Nvidia employees.)
The alleged Chinese spy, Alice Huang, was an executive of Nvidia customer Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that U.S. officials suspect of helping route advanced Nvidia chips into China. The Democratic inquiry comes from 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 the minority party, they can ask questions but can’t compel answers.
Their humdinger of a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asks the department to preserve records about an arrangement they find questionable and, they allege, illegal.
“The scheme worked like this,” as the letter describes it. President Trump agreed to sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China as long as the chips, manufactured by Taiwan, were first shipped to the United States.
