Democrats launch Nvidia investigation, write scathing letter on Huang’s ‘scheme’ with Trump

On the same day Nvidia's founder left the company, two senior Democrats opened an inquiry aimed not just at Nvidia but at the Trump administration's handling of chip sales to China. Rep. Richard Neal, the top Democrat on House Ways and Means, and Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on Senate Finance, sent Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a letter asking the department to preserve records on an arrangement they call questionable and, they allege, illegal.

This matters because it moves the scandal from personal conduct to public governance. Export controls on advanced AI chips are national security policy. If those controls were bent by a revenue-sharing deal, donations or leverage over a compromised executive, that is a much bigger problem than one CEO's private life.

Let's be clear about what this is and isn't. As the minority, Neal and Wyden can ask questions but cannot compel answers. The letter is a demand to preserve records, not a finding. Still, the questions are pointed, and we think they are the right ones.

The core allegation, as TechCrunch summarizes it: the president allowed Nvidia's H200 chips to be sold to China if they first passed through the United States, where a tariff effectively took a cut, and then Commerce issued an export license. The letter calls that what appears to be an unconstitutional export tax. The revenue-sharing part was not secret. In August 2025, Nvidia and AMD agreed to share 15% of China chip revenue with the government to secure licenses, as the AP reported then.

What is new is the timeline the letter draws. It asks why Commerce kept letting Megaspeed buy chips after Lutnick was reportedly told of intelligence suspicions about Alice Huang and her relationship with the Nvidia CEO. It asks why the department reportedly cleared other Asian buyers that had no physical presence at their listed addresses. And it notes the deal came after the president learned of what the letter calls the executive's "compromised position" and after Nvidia gave $26 million toward the president's projects, including the ballroom. The implication is that knowledge of the affair was used as leverage. That is an allegation, and we will treat it as one until evidence surfaces.

The context makes it hard to wave away. In a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, the president described threatening an unnamed AI executive with jail, after which, he said, that executive completely changed course. We do not know who he meant. We do know that a policy where export access, tariffs and corporate donations sit this close together invites exactly this kind of suspicion.

Our position is simple. AI chips are strategic infrastructure, and the rules on who gets them should be boring, transparent and enforced the same way for every company. Deals that look transactional erode trust in export control and in the industry. If this becomes the norm, the most powerful technology of the decade gets allocated by personal leverage rather than law.

This is the second congressional inquiry since reports of the alleged spy affair broke. A Republican-led group spanning the House Select Committee on the CCP, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees demanded closed-door testimony and threatened a subpoena; after resigning, the former CEO agreed to testify. Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore-based Nvidia customer Megaspeed, is suspected by US officials of helping route advanced chips into China.