Howard Lutnick in the hot seat as lawmakers demand answers on Nvidia sales to China

Detailed summary

Fuming lawmakers want to haul in Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to demand answers on the bizarre decision to allow powerful chips to flow to China – and cut off the flow entirely.

Outraged lawmakers want to haul Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick before Congress to demand answers about the bizarre decision to allow billions of dollars in advanced AI chips to be sold to China — as they seek to halt future shipments.

“Congress is not going to let this go,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), asking why Lutnick would greenlight the sale of $4 billion in chips to a company where “a Chinese spy is having an affair with the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world and one of the largest AI companies in the world?”

The sex-crazed ex-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned this week following reports he had an affair with Alice Huang, an alleged asset of Chinese intelligence. Now, within weeks he will have to answer not only for his personal conduct, but for pushing to avoid restrictions on his former company’s chip sales.

There are “huge national security concerns here,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “I mean, a Chinese spy? And where are those chips going?”

Asked by The Post why the US government didn’t slap more restraints on Nvidia’s most sophisticated product, he responded: “I don’t like any of this. I don’t like giving them chips. This whole AI thing – ‘We need to win the AI race with China’ that I hear all the time from all the AI boosters in this body, but yet we’re giving them chips. I mean, that’s where they’re deficient, and yet we’ve been giving them to them. It’s crazy.”

Huang helped assemble a company board filled with loyalists, many of whom hadn’t run a company before or didn’t come from tech. “I don’t even know who’s on the Nvidia board. I hope they don’t have any Chinese spies,” Kennedy told The Post.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), a Senate Intelligence Committee member, told The Post he has written the Commerce Department demanding that Lutnick come brief the Senate Intel committee on what went wrong. House investigators are also clamoring to haul in Lutnick and Huang.

The Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Sen.

The Justice Department is…

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