Lutnick under fire: How Trump’s commerce secretary cultivated Nvidia’s CEO while chip controls slipped

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, left, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, right speak in the Cross Hall of the White House before an event on "Investing in America" in April 2025. Trump was joined by CEOs to highlight companies and their investments in the United States during the event. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images via CNN Newsource

The first call, as Jensen Huang remembers it, came from Howard Lutnick.

It was around the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, and Lutnick was preparing to become his Commerce Secretary. His message to the head of Nvidia was simple: whenever you need the president, call us.

Recounting the call on Joe Rogan’s podcast last December, Huang remembered fondly that Lutnick had called him and his company “a national treasure.”

Two years later, Huang has resigned from Nvidia and Lutnick is under intense scrutiny for what some Trump advisers see as inaction in placing limits on US chip exports to China and his role in cultivating Huang as a top administration ally. Other administration officials have accused Lutnick of bucking internal consensus and Trump’s own directives in failing to blacklist an Nvidia customer suspected of funneling chips to China.

Some of Trump’s advisers, reeling from the fallout of Huang’s resignation, have begun discussing whether Lutnick should be dismissed, according to people familiar with the conversations.

This account is derived from more than a dozen sources, including officials inside the administration and the tech industry. They described a rapidly deepening relationship that came to influence nearly all areas of the White House’s stance toward some of the most powerful technology in the world.

Questions surrounding the scandal — and the fresh push to limit sales of advanced chips to China — are likely to persist as Trump prepares to meet next week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Shenzhen, the hub of China’s tech industry. American officials said they didn’t expect Trump to raise the alleged spying with Xi, and said China wouldn’t have a say in whether Washington tightens restrictions on access to chips.

‘What the hell is Nvidia?’

Until shortly after Trump’s inauguration last year, Huang was nearly a stranger to Trump’s world. He would skip the swearing-in to spend Lunar New Year with employees in Asia, while his tech titan counterparts Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos had prime spots in the Capitol Rotunda.

Trump, by his own account, had barely heard of Nvidia or its CEO: “What’s his name? What the hell is Nvidia?” he recalled wondering a few months later. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

His ignorance wouldn’t last long. Eleven days after being sworn in for a second term, Trump met Huang at the White House. Huang also met that day with Lutnick, still awaiting confirmation as Commerce Secretary. As Trump signed executive orders in the Oval Office later that afternoon with the cameras rolling, he was full of praise for the man he’d only recently met.

“He’s a great gentleman, and I hadn’t met him,” Trump said as he reflected on what he called a good meeting. “He’s the biggest in the world in terms of chips.”

Over the next two years, the relationship would deepen over dinners, phone calls and many, many meetings. It was aided at every step by Lutnick, who helped elevate Huang’s profile and whose agency is responsible for keeping sensitive American technology away from adversaries.

On Thursday, after Huang resigned from Nvidia following revelations he had extramarital affairs with two women, one of whom may be connected to China, Lutnick’s critics began circling. Administration officials who have long been concerned about Huang’s influence on Trump said privately that the Commerce Department failed to crack down on chip shipments to companies suspected of passing them on secretly to China.

Speaking on CNBC Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a wide swath of Trump’s administration — including the Treasury and State departments, the Pentagon and the US Trade Representative — favored placing the company at the center of the scandal, Megaspeed, on an export blacklist. He said it was the Commerce Department, led by Lutnick, that had failed to follow through.

“Commerce…has the pen…and you will have to ask them about their internal process,” he said.

Both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded Lutnick answer questions about what he knew, and when. House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats wrote to Lutnick demanding to know what he and his export control chief, Jeffrey Kessler, knew about Megaspeed, and when. Senate Democrats directed Lutnick to preserve documents, communications and records related to Nvidia’s exports of advanced chips. And some Democrats went further in their criticism of Lutnick.

“I think he should be fired,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen told ABC News in an interview that aired Sunday. Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the Senate subcommittee that oversees Commerce Department funding, is running to be Senate majority leader in the next Congress.

“This news is as concerning as it gets,” Sen. Jim Banks, a Trump ally, said Thursday on Fox News. “When you’re in a war with another country, you don’t give them your best technologies. And that’s why lawmakers, for the last two years, have been pushing hard to stop our high-end computer chips from being exported to China.”

The White House said Thursday Trump “maintains complete confidence in the secretary and his ability to carry out the position as the most transformative Commerce Secretary in modern history.”

A deepening relationship

A few months after Huang’s first Oval Office meeting, Lutnick played a role in facilitating Huang’s attendance at a US$1-million-a-head MAGA Inc. dinner at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the matter. The April dinner proved fateful. Huang used it to make a final appeal against planned restrictions on selling Nvidia’s H20 chip to Chinese customers. Trump, meanwhile, walked away impressed with his new, extraordinarily wealthy friend.

Huang’s charm offensive at the Palm Beach dinner seemed to work, but only briefly. The White House moved to shelve the planned curbs. But as a trade war with China heated up, Nvidia later disclosed that the government had told it that H20 sales to China would require a license – and that the requirement would stay in place indefinitely.

Huang kept working at it. At an Investing in America event at the end of April 2025, Lutnick and Huang were photographed together in the Cross Hall. Trump turned the moment into a show of affection. “I could have Jensen negotiating. He’d blow my people away,” Trump said. “Even Howard would say that.”

Lutnick, sitting in the audience, quickly concurred. “We’ll take him.”

By July, Huang was back in the Oval Office. His pitch this time was tailored to Trump. Selling chips to China, he argued, could create American jobs and cement American AI as the world standard. He had already said publicly in May that the ban already cost Nvidia $15 billion in sales.

Two top administration officials who had become close Huang allies accompanied him in the Oval Office: Lutnick and David Sacks, the White House AI adviser, who championed “exporting the US AI stack” – the idea that selling older chips like the H20 abroad keeps the world hooked on American technology.

Five days later, Nvidia announced the government had assured it that it would be permitted to sell the H20 in China. Huang was in Beijing when he said sales would resume. The next day, Lutnick went on CNBC, explaining the decision as a way to get China “addicted to the American technology stack.”

The H20 deal was finished in August, and the president negotiated it himself, directly with Huang, as they sat face-to-face in the White House. Lutnick’s agency immediately moved to issue H20 licenses. Trump would go on to publicly confirm the arrangement that made the H20 sales possible: Nvidia would pay the government 15 per cent of its China chip revenue.

Through the fall, Huang drew closer to the president, and Trump regularly mentioned Huang off-the-cuff in his public remarks. In October, Trump spoke with Huang, Marc Benioff and other business leaders about sending federal law enforcement into San Francisco, and the next day he called the plan off, citing those conversations.

That same month, as Trump was preparing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom project, a person familiar with the matter said. Nvidia never appeared on the published donor list.

The warnings

In the summer of 2025, as Trump and Huang were growing closer, a phone call began to unravel something larger. Singapore police, investigating a cloud company called Megaspeed, questioned its former managing director, Alice Huang, and barred her from leaving the country. She had met Jensen Huang at an Nvidia event in California in early 2024. The two were photographed together at a trade show in Taipei that June.

During a briefing with lawmakers on Capitol Hill at the end of 2025, federal agents said they suspected Jensen Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort,” citing his close relationship with Alice Huang, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

The briefing was centered on an investigation into suspected efforts to circumvent US export control restrictions and attempts to influence the Trump administration’s policy on shipping certain Nvidia chips to China, according to the sources. The FBI, which is conducting the primary counterintelligence investigation, told lawmakers last year that it was particularly suspicious of Alice Huang’s seemingly overnight career pivot from Chinese State television journalist to businesswoman with an unusually large amount of purchasing power in the Chinese economy, one of the sources said.

Trump himself had been briefed on intelligence about Alice Huang in late 2025 and took no action, CNN previously reported. But the investigations continued.

The Commerce Department had been investigating Megaspeed since 2024 to determine whether the firm had run afoul of US export rules, but had stopped short of placing the company on the so-called Entity List, a trade blacklist that bars US suppliers from selling to listed firms without a license. Other areas of the administration had grown frustrated at the delay, including at the State Department and National Security Council, people familiar with the matter said.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, had taken notice and quickly fired off a direct request to Lutnick to investigate Megaspeed. Behind the scenes, executive branch officials from other national security agencies were raising Megaspeed as a clear target for investigation and inclusion on Commerce’s Entity List.

They got no substantive response. And in meetings when the case came up, Lutnick’s deputies would respond by telling officials little more than it was Lutnick’s decision to make, according to people familiar with the conversations.

In the CNBC interview Friday, Bessent suggested the inaction had violated directives given by Trump himself.

“I am frustrated when President Trump made it very clear that China should not receive any Nvidia chips above H100s,” Bessent said, referring to an older-generation data-center chip. “And so any leakage is very frustrating because it hurts our great companies in the AI race, gives the Chinese an advantage.”

When Trump was preparing to travel to China for a state visit in May, the delegation announced on May 11 initially didn’t include Huang.

The next day, Trump phoned Huang to invite him. As Trump flew aboard Air Force One to Anchorage that afternoon with Elon Musk and Sean Hannity, he received a briefing from Secretary of State Marco Rubio about some of the concerns surrounding Huang and China.

On the ground in Alaska, Huang boarded for the final leg to Beijing.

On May 14, Xi greeted Trump at the Great Hall of the People, and Musk, Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook were the only executives the White House listed at the arrival ceremony. Huang called it “one of the most important summits in human history.”

In the months that followed, there was little to indicate Trump or Lutnick had concerns about Huang. Trump praised him in the Oval Office. Lutnick, moderating a September G20 session in North Carolina, called him “an American treasure” — the same flattery deployed on their first phone call nearly two years earlier.

In September, Huang took a call from Trump on stage and put him on speakerphone at a summit in Los Angeles. Trump called AI-takeover fears “a hoax,” called data centers “the oil of the next 20, 25 years,” and said opposition played into China’s hands.

Ten days later, Huang and his wife were at the White House to attend Trump’s State Dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. They were seated at the head table with the two leaders and their spouses.

The reckoning

Less than a month later, the first bombshell dropped: U.S. officials had concluded Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence asset who had cultivated a close relationship with Jensen Huang. CNN later reported the U.S. intelligence community is still working to understand the relationship between Alice Huang and the Chinese government, with multiple sources telling CNN that the intelligence collected on her to date does not prove that she was acting as a spy for Beijing.

Trump, officials said, would not hang his friend out to dry. As one official put it, Huang’s problems were Nvidia’s, Nvidia’s were the economy’s, and that became the president’s problem. Trump called Huang “brilliant” and, “unless we find out something to the contrary,” “very above board.”

But the political ground had also shifted. Democrats won both chambers in the midterm elections, and voters rejected data-center projects in 40 of 41 ballot measures. The Republican chairs of three House committees – Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and the China select committee, all set to lose their gavels in January – asked Huang as well as Nvidia’s general counsel for closed-door interviews next month. Kessler, Lutnick’s deputy at the Commerce Department, has also been asked to appear at a hearing scheduled for next month.

Republicans are now accusing Lutnick of putting Trump in a vulnerable position.

“Shame on Lutnick for allowing that exposure to happen for the president. Raises a question about what other ones are out there,” Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters Thursday.

During a meeting in the Situation Room last week, Treasury Secretary Bessent turned to Lutnick and asked why Megaspeed wasn’t on the entities list. According to sources familiar with the meeting, Lutnick stammered, “I don’t know. I’ll look into it.”