Now-former Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has agreed to answer questions from Congress about his extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-Fla.) told reporters Thursday that Huang’s team had confirmed he would appear after Mast and two other GOP committee chairmen threatened him with a subpoena Wednesday.
The interview is expected to take place behind closed doors before Congress breaks for its Thanksgiving recess next Friday.
“He has some very serious questions to answer,” Mast said of Huang, 63, who resigned as Nvidia’s president and CEO early Thursday, ending his 33-year run at the chipmaking behemoth.
Huang’s exit followed reports of a second affair â this one with Kimberly Powell, Nvidiaâs vice president of health care and a direct subordinate â on top of his relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Singapore-based Nvidia customer Megaspeed whom US intelligence suspects of spying for Beijing.
Huang has denied compromising national security â but the fallout no longer stops at Nvidia’s door.
Republicans have turned their fire on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department never placed Megaspeed on its “Entity List” â denoting which companies are barred from receiving sensitive technology from American firms without a license.
Singapore has long drawn suspicion as a waypoint for American chips bound for China. Last year, the city-state charged three men with misleading Dell and Supermicro about the destination of servers that may have held restricted Nvidia chips â costing the companies close to $400 million. A fourth person was charged in connection with the scheme this past April.
Megaspeed has bought more than $4 billion in Nvidia chips, by some analyst estimates, and federal authorities have investigated whether the company helped route them to China in violation of US export laws. Megaspeed denies any wrongdoing.
Lutnick was sent a classified memo detailing Jensen and Alice Huang’s relationship in May, according to Axios. The New York Times reported that Commerce handed its own Megaspeed probe over to the Justice Department late last year after Nvidia’s general counsel contacted investigators seeking an update on the matter.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly confronted Lutnick in the Situation Room last week over why Megaspeed had not been blacklisted. A Commerce spokesperson denied that any such exchange happened.
“Secretary Lutnick needs to answer that in front of God and our country,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told Politico Wednesday.
Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) has likewise called for Lutnick to testify.
Not every Republican has broken with the Commerce chief. Mast said Thursday he still has confidence in Lutnick, though he wants Congress to examine the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which enforces export controls and was initially handling the Megaspeed probe.
“President Trump maintains complete confidence in the secretary and his ability to carry out the position as the most transformative commerce secretary in modern history,” a White House official told The Post.
Lutnick drew fresh scrutiny from the Senate on Thursday, when Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wrote to urge that Chinese chipmaker CXMT be added to the Entity List and that Commerce explore banning the sale of its products in America.
The state-subsidized company, Cotton wrote, “poses a growing risk to our economic prosperity and military superiority.”
Lawmakers from both parties have pressed Commerce to blacklist CXMT since early 2025 â but it is still not on the list.
In fact, Lutnick’s department has not added a single company to the list in more than a year, according to the Federal Register.
