Leaders in the US congress have promised a closer investigation of allegations that Chinese intelligence agents targeted Nvidia, after the company’s chief executive Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday.
House of Representatives Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Thursday that the allegations would be investigated by Democratic members of Congress who will lead important committees when the party assumes the majority in January.
Jeffries said that “the American people deserve answers” and that Congress would “get to the bottom of whether America’s national security has been compromised”.
Huang’s ties to administration
Huang’s affair with suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang, or Huang Le, which he acknowledged in a statement on 8 November, has also raised broader questions around the current administration’s oversight of the export of Nvidia chips.
Reports said Donald Trump was informed that US investigators had concluded Huang was in an intimate relationship with a suspected spy for China, but the administration chose to take no action.
Huang has cultivated close ties with Trump, who over the past two years has championed broader exports of Nvidia’s chips, in the face of opposition from many lawmakers.
In the wake of the scandal, senior White House officials are discussing whether Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick should be pushed out, Reuters reported on Thursday.
Limited oversight of exports
A growing number of lawmakers have criticised Lutnick over the administration’s refusal to add dozens of Chinese companies to the Entity List trade blacklist.
Other agencies had also fruitlessly pushed for the Commerce Department to add Megaspeed International, the Singapore-based data centre company at which Alice Huang was a key executive, to the blacklist.
In 2025, at a time when Alice Huang and Megaspeed were under investigation by the US, Alice Huang told Chinese investors she and her business partner had “no problem securing GPUs”, for a south-east Asian data centre project worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the reported.
The White House said the administration “maintains complete confidence in the secretary and his ability to carry out the position”.
US not helpful in Singapore probe
Singapore’s government said US officials were unhelpful in the city-state’s independent investigation of Alice Huang, Megaspeed, and other companies it investigated over AI chip shipments, the Associated Press reported.
Singapore authorities contacted US-based server maker Supermicro for information related to the investigation, but after receiving “limited cooperation”, pursued the matter through repeated requests to the FBI beginning in September 2025, according to the report.
“Despite these repeated requests, Singapore has to date received limited information or assistance in respect of the company,” the Singapore government said.