Neal and Wyden turn the Nvidia scandal toward Commerce and the H200 China export deal

On the day Nvidia’s founder left the company (our coverage), Rep. Richard Neal, the top Democrat on House Ways and Means, and Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on Senate Finance, sent Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick a letter, TechCrunch reports. It asks the department to preserve records on an arrangement they call questionable and, they allege, illegal. The target is not just Nvidia but the administration’s handling of chip sales to China.

Be clear about what this is. As the minority, Neal and Wyden can ask questions but can’t compel answers. A preservation demand isn’t a finding. The questions are pointed, though, and they are the right ones, because export controls on advanced AI chips are national security policy.

As TechCrunch summarizes it, the president allowed Nvidia’s H200 chips to be sold to China if they first passed through the United States, where a tariff effectively took a cut, after which Commerce issued an export license. The letter calls that what appears to be an unconstitutional export tax. The revenue sharing itself wasn’t secret: in August 2025, Nvidia and AMD agreed to share 15% of China chip revenue with the government to secure licenses, as the AP reported then.

The letter asks why Commerce kept letting Megaspeed buy chips after Lutnick was reportedly told of intelligence suspicions about Alice Huang and her relationship with the Nvidia CEO. It asks why the department reportedly cleared other Asian buyers with no physical presence at their listed addresses, echoing reporting on an approved H200 buyer whose China office was an empty shell (our coverage). And it notes the deal came after the president learned of what the letter calls the executive’s “compromised position” and after Nvidia gave $26 million toward the president’s projects, including the ballroom. The implication is that knowledge of the affair was used as leverage. That is an allegation and should be treated as one until evidence surfaces.

Context makes it hard to dismiss. In a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, the president described threatening an unnamed AI executive with jail, after which, he said, the executive completely changed course. Who he meant is unknown. A policy where export access, tariffs and corporate donations sit this close together invites exactly this suspicion. Earlier reporting suggested intelligence warnings were set aside (coverage).

This is the second congressional inquiry since the alleged spy affair was reported. A Republican-led group spanning the House Select Committee on the CCP, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence demanded closed-door testimony and threatened a subpoena; after resigning, the former CEO agreed to testify (coverage). AI chips are strategic infrastructure, and rules on who gets them should be boring, transparent and enforced the same way for every company. If deals that look transactional become normal, the decade’s most powerful technology gets allocated by leverage rather than law. More in our regulation coverage and NVIDIA coverage.