SAN FRANCISCO, March 24 (Reuters) – Two U.S. senators have asked U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to investigate whether remarks by Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab 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, opens new tab 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 (SMCI.O), opens new tab, 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.”