Nvidia ousts founder Jensen Huang amid congressional investigations into China chip sales

Nvidia parts ways with its founder

Nvidia has removed Jensen Huang as CEO, according to TechCrunch, ending his leadership of the company he founded. The move came on Thursday, shortly after Huang admitted to an extramarital affair with a woman whom U.S. officials reportedly suspect of being a Chinese spy. TechCrunch reports he has since been accused of further affairs with Nvidia employees.

The woman, identified in the report as Alice Huang, was an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based Nvidia customer that U.S. officials suspect of helping route advanced Nvidia chips into China.

Democrats open an inquiry

The same day, Democrats in Congress opened an inquiry into how the Trump administration handled Nvidia's chip sales to China. The effort is led by Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. Because Democrats hold the minority in both chambers, TechCrunch notes, they can request information but cannot compel answers.

Their letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick asks the department to preserve records of an arrangement the lawmakers consider questionable and, they allege, illegal.

What the letter describes

As laid out in the letter, President Trump approved sales of Nvidia's H200 chips to China on the condition that the chips, manufactured in Taiwan, first be shipped to the United States. A tariff was applied on arrival, which the letter argues amounted to an unconstitutional export tax that let the government take a cut of Nvidia's China sales. The Commerce Department, led by Lutnick, then issued the export license.

The revenue-sharing element of this arrangement was already public. The Associated Press reported in August 2025 that Nvidia and AMD had each agreed to give the U.S. government 15 percent of their revenue from China chip sales in exchange for export licenses.

The letter pushes beyond that deal on several fronts. It asks why Lutnick kept allowing Megaspeed to buy chips after U.S. intelligence reportedly warned him about Alice Huang and her relationship with Jensen Huang. It questions approvals granted to other Asian companies whose listed addresses had no physical presence. And it raises the role of Nvidia's donations to Trump's projects, including $26 million toward a ballroom, noting that the export deal was approved after Trump had learned of Huang's personal vulnerability.

TechCrunch also points to a 60 Minutes interview with Trump that aired the preceding Sunday, in which the president described threatening an unnamed AI executive with jail time; in his telling, the executive reversed course afterward.

Huang agrees to testify

The Democratic inquiry is the second congressional investigation to surface since news of the alleged spy affair broke. A separate Republican-led group, spanning the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, had demanded that Huang testify in a closed-door session and threatened a subpoena if he refused. On Thursday, after leaving Nvidia, Huang agreed to appear.

Why it matters

Nvidia supplies the hardware behind most of the AI industry's compute, so the abrupt exit of its founder over a relationship with a person suspected of espionage is a major shakeup for the sector on its own. But the investigations reach further, examining whether export licensing was shaped by a revenue-sharing arrangement, political donations and the administration's knowledge of a chief executive's private conduct, with chip flows to China at stake. Because one set of investigators can merely ask questions while the other can issue subpoenas, how much ultimately comes out may depend as much on committee control as on the facts themselves.