The chairs of three House committees have asked Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang to appear before a closed-door briefing on Nov. 18, after reports that US intelligence officials believe he was the target of a Chinese intelligence operation. Reps. John Moolenaar, Brian Mast and Rick Crawford, who lead the committees on China, foreign affairs and intelligence, wrote to Huang this week asking him to answer questions in a joint session.
"Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the People's Republic of China's access to sensitive US technology and information," the lawmakers wrote, adding that "the issue of PRC infiltration and access to cutting-edge US technology is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress."
A spy plot and a closed-door briefing
The letter follows reporting that intelligence officials believe Huang was targeted by a Chinese spying operation centered on Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud company that has bought billions of dollars of Nvidia's chips. Megaspeed, founded in 2023 as a spin-off of a Chinese gaming company, has previously drawn US scrutiny over potential chip smuggling, though no charges followed. Nvidia has said an unannounced internal inspection of Megaspeed's Singapore operations turned up no evidence that its chips were being diverted into China.
Nvidia rejected the espionage claims outright and would not say whether Huang plans to attend the Nov. 18 session. "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job. Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," the company said, adding that its "regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information—not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets—and zero information relevant to national security." The company said Huang travels with an "outstanding security team" and that Washington regularly updates it about people of concern — though, notably, Huang has not received the "defensive briefing" the intelligence community typically offers potential espionage targets.
Shell companies and a leaky supply chain
The hearing request lands days after a separate finding that the Commerce Department and Nvidia have approved sales of advanced H200 chips to Chinese firms with troubling backgrounds. One approved buyer, a firm called New Matrix, lists an address that turned out to be an empty industrial unit — "a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be" — with no record of the company at the building or with its property manager. New Matrix's owners reportedly have ties to a Chinese private equity firm the US has blacklisted since 2024, part of what reporting describes as a pattern rather than an isolated lapse.
Nvidia's chip pipeline has grown more porous on multiple fronts this year. A Supermicro co-founder, Wally Liaw, was arrested and charged with smuggling Nvidia chips into China; he has pleaded not guilty. Separately, a truckload of Nvidia hardware worth $11.4 million disappeared en route from Oakland to Texas in August, one of more than $100 million in similar hardware heists since June that investigators say increasingly involve GPS spoofing and staged collisions with police escorts.
Nvidia's China access itself is the product of a reversal: the chips were restricted from sale to China under the Biden administration, but the Trump administration relaxed those limits after Nvidia agreed to give the government a 15 percent cut of the relevant sales, following an intense lobbying push from Huang.
What happens next
The Nov. 18 briefing would put Huang in front of lawmakers at a moment when his company's export compliance, supply-chain security and personal security are all under simultaneous scrutiny. The committees say they want to understand what protocols Nvidia has in place against "foreign adversary espionage" and how much latitude the company's China-based customers actually have. Nvidia says it is confident the government would have warned it directly had officials believed Huang was a genuine target. Whether that confidence survives a public hearing — and whether Commerce tightens its vetting of buyers like New Matrix — will likely shape the next round of the export-control fight in Washington.
