By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, March 24 (Reuters) – Two U.S. senators have asked U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to investigate whether remarks by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have misled U.S. officials and influenced their decision to grant Nvidia licenses to send its AI chips to China.
The letter on Monday from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks, both members of the Senate Banking Committee, comes after the Justice Department last week charged three men tied to Nvidia customer Super Micro Computer, including one of the company’s co-founders who was photographed near Huang at an Nvidia conference last week, with smuggling billions of dollars worth of AI servers into China.
In their letter, Warren and Banks cited two remarks that Huang made to reporters in 2025, as Nvidia was working to secure export licenses to send chips to China. In one remark, Huang said: “There’s no evidence of any AI chip diversion. These are massive systems. The Grace Blackwell system is nearly two tons, and so you’re not going to be putting that in your pocket or your backpack anytime soon.”
In another set of remarks cited by the lawmakers, Huang said: “The important thing is that the countries and the companies that we sell to recognize that diversion is not allowed and everybody would like to continue to buy Nvidia technology. And so they monitor themselves very carefully.”
In their letter, Warren and Banks cited media reports out before Huang’s remarks focused on probes into potential illegal shipments of AI chips to China.
“Those statements were not simply wrong in hindsight,” the lawmakers wrote of Huang’s remarks. “They were contradicted by reporting available at the time and potentially misled U.S. officials.”
The senators asked Lutnick to “determine whether representations, statements, or certifications made by Nvidia’s leadership to federal officials and to the public regarding the absence of chip diversion were materially false or misleading, and whether those representations, statements, or certifications influenced licensing decisions in a way that warrants further investigation or referral.”
In a statement, an Nvidia spokesperson said that “strict compliance is a top priority” for the company.
“The administration’s critics are unintentionally promoting the interests of foreign competitors on U.S. entity lists – America should always want its industry to compete for vetted and approved commercial business, supporting real jobs for real Americans.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Andrea Ricci )
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