Two U.S. senators asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday to investigate whether statements by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang could have misled U.S. officials and affected licensing decisions allowing the company to ship AI chips to China.
The letter from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks, both members of the Senate Banking Committee, cites comments Huang made to reporters in 2025 while Nvidia was pursuing export licenses for shipments of its AI chips to China. The request follows a Justice Department action last week that charged three men tied to Nvidia customer Super Micro Computer with smuggling billions of dollars worth of AI servers into China, including one defendant who had been photographed near Huang at an Nvidia conference the previous week.
In their correspondence to Lutnick, Warren and Banks highlight two specific public remarks attributed to Huang. In one comment, 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 passage cited by the senators, Huang was quoted as saying: "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."
The senators wrote that reporting available before Huang’s statements had already focused on investigations into potential illegal shipments of AI chips to China. "Those statements were not simply wrong in hindsight," the lawmakers wrote. "They were contradicted by reporting available at the time and potentially misled U.S. officials."
Warren and Banks asked Lutnick to "determine whether representations, statements, or certifications made by Nvidia’s leadership to federal officials and to the public regarding the absence of chip diversion were materially false or misleading, and whether those representations, statements, or certifications influenced licensing decisions in a way that warrants further investigation or referral."
Nvidia provided a brief response through a company spokesperson, stating that "strict compliance is a top priority" for the firm. The spokesperson added: "The administration’s critics are unintentionally promoting the interests of foreign competitors on U.S. entity lists - America should always want its industry to compete for vetted and approved commercial business, supporting real jobs for real Americans."
The senators' letter and the Justice Department charges are connected in the public record by reporting and photographs that placed a Super Micro Computer co-founder in proximity to an Nvidia event while federal authorities pursued allegations of illegal exports. The Warren-Banks request asks the Commerce Department to examine whether Nvidia leadership statements to officials and the public regarding the absence of chip diversion were accurate and whether those communications bore on the department's licensing decisions.
The letter does not itself make legal findings; rather, it seeks an administrative determination from the Commerce Department about the accuracy and possible influence of Nvidia's public and private representations during a period when export licenses were being evaluated. The Justice Department action, described in the senators' letter, accuses three individuals connected to Super Micro Computer of smuggling AI servers into China and places that investigation alongside the contemporaneous public remarks by Nvidia’s CEO.
The inquiry requested by Warren and Banks focuses on whether statements were materially false or misleading to officials and whether such statements affected licensing outcomes in a way that would justify further investigation or referral to other authorities.