After Jensen Huang is Howard Lutnick the prime target of national security inquiry?

Detailed summary

The character and conflicts of Commerce — and commerce.

When questioning the motives of certain public leaders, the Roman orator Cicero was said to have used as a shorthand, “cui bono?” meaning, whose interests come first? That line rings true as Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick falls under rapidly escalating bipartisan scrutiny over his role in the flow of Nvidia chips into China.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday after reports of affairs with a direct report and with Alice Huang, a suspected Chinese spy, yet the national security questions he leaves behind keep growing amidst escalating congressional investigations. Megaspeed, the Nvidia customer where Alice Huang was an executive, was suspected of funneling advanced chips to China for years, yet the U.S. government took little action. Many are now asking: Who knew what, and when? And why is this surfacing only now?

We have already described Nvidia directors’ exposure to shareholder lawsuits over their own failures of oversight. Now the scrutiny is shifting to Washington. How did the U.S. government look past so grave a threat to national security for so long, and let these sales go on? As the reporting accumulates, all roads lead to one person, who by multiple accounts blocked action over the objections of fellow cabinet members and leading voices in both parties in Congress: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. He is now squarely on the hot seat, and it grows hotter by the day as more information comes to light.

Megaspeed has long been a major target of U.S. government focus amidst pervasive allegations that the Singapore-based data center company helped Chinese firms evade U.S. export controls on sensitive Nvidia chips.

The Department of Commerce’s own agents began investigating Megaspeed, the Singapore firm that bought billions of dollars of Nvidia chips and is suspected of diverting them to China, in 2024, under the Biden Administration.

That sparked many concerns even within the GOP, with respected Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton…

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