Top Republican lawmakers have asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to appear before a joint closed-door congressional briefing on November 18 to answer questions about what U.S. intelligence officials believe is a Chinese spying operation targeting him, underscoring the widening national security scrutiny of Nvidia's role in the global AI race.
The chairs of the House committees on China, foreign affairs, and intelligence — representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford — sent the request to Huang this week, citing what they described as significant national security concerns.
"The issue of PRC infiltration and access to cutting-edge US technology is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress. It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which US national security has been placed at risk," the three lawmakers wrote.
The congressional summons follows a report that U.S. intelligence officials believe Huang has been targeted by a Chinese spy operation, first reported by Ars Technica. The concerns center on a Chinese woman named Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud company that has purchased billions of dollars of Nvidia chips.
Nvidia rejected the underlying claims and on Thursday declined to say whether Huang would comply with the request. "Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job. Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year," the company said in a statement. "Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security," it added.
Lawmakers said they specifically wanted Huang to address the security protocols Nvidia maintains to guard against foreign espionage. Nvidia said its chief executive has an "outstanding security team" that accompanies him, and that it was confident the U.S. government would have alerted the company if any individual posed a threat to its operations.
Nvidia did conduct its own unannounced on-site inspections at Megaspeed's Singapore facilities after becoming aware of U.S. concerns, but those internal reviews found no evidence of chips being diverted into China, according to people familiar with the matter. The U.S. had previously scrutinized Megaspeed — founded in 2023 as a spin-off from a Chinese gaming company — over potential chip smuggling, though no charges followed.
Huang has not received a "defensive briefing," the kind the intelligence community typically provides to potential espionage targets, according to reporting on the matter. Nvidia said it regularly receives information from Washington about individuals of concern.
The congressional pressure arrives as a separate report reveals that Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI has sought access to Nvidia's advanced Blackwell chips through data centers in Europe, circumventing U.S. export controls that restrict direct shipment of those chips to China. Four people familiar with the matter told CNBC that deals have been discussed this year for Moonshot to rent computing capacity from neoclouds hosting Nvidia GPUs at European facilities.
Moonshot, founded in 2023 and based in Beijing, makes the Kimi family of AI models. The White House said in July that the company had previously accessed Nvidia Blackwell chips via a facility in Thailand. Talks for arrangements involving clusters of 8,000 or more Blackwell GPUs hosted in Europe have taken place, one source said, describing Moonshot as "very aggressive" in its pursuit of computing power.
One source said it had been proposed that Moonshot pay 30% to 50% more upfront than a non-Chinese customer would — a premium that neoclouds and financing firms seek to hedge against a potential future ban on remote access arrangements.
Current U.S. law does not give regulators broad authority to restrict cloud-based access to controlled chips hosted overseas. Lawmakers have proposed the Remote Access Security Act to close that gap; the bill passed the House in January but has not cleared the Senate.
The situation facing Nvidia — a congressional summons, an intelligence-linked espionage allegation, and a Chinese client pursuing its hardware through European intermediaries — reflects the accelerating collision between U.S. export control policy and the global demand for advanced AI computing power, a tension that shows no signs of easing ahead of the November 18 hearing.