Nvidia Loses 24.6% of Its Value as Huang's China Scandal Spreads

Nvidia shares have lost 24.6% of their value since October 29, the day The New York Times first reported on Jensen Huang's relationship with a Chinese executive. The billionaire resigned as chairman and CEO on Thursday, but the scandal shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, it's widening into an investigation of the Trump administration itself.

Huang has agreed to testify before congressional investigators, without a subpoena, according to Bloomberg and NBC News. His team and committee staff were in contact as recently as Wednesday night, according to Rep. Brian Mast, one of three Republican House committee chairs who requested the testimony in a November 4 letter—more than a week before the resignation. Mast told reporters Thursday his committee still wants to hear from Huang.

What does Congress want to know?

At the center of the inquiry is Huang's relationship with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a company U.S. intelligence had suspected for more than a year of collaborating with the Chinese government. Megaspeed is suspected of funneling trade-restricted Nvidia AI chips to Chinese labs. Lawmakers also worry Alice Huang may have given Beijing access to trade secrets and sensitive national security information.

Megaspeed bought billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia chips in recent years, including some of its most powerful Blackwell chips, which remain off limits to Chinese labs. A Times report last year described boxes of powerful Nvidia chips sitting in a nearly empty Megaspeed office in Malaysia—fueling suspicions the company served as a conduit for restricted technology bound for China.

The three Republican chairmen—Mast, John Moolenaar, and Rick Crawford—didn't mince words in their letter. "Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the PRC's access to sensitive U.S. technology and information," they wrote. "It is vital that Congress determines the extent to which U.S. national security has been placed at risk."

Could the White House be implicated?

The scrutiny no longer stops at Huang or Nvidia. On November 11, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller demanding the administration preserve documents. The senators want:

• Records on Nvidia's chip exports and government investigations into Megaspeed
• An intelligence memorandum reportedly circulated to senior officials before Trump's May 2026 visit to China
• Communications between Huang and Trump
• Documents on discussions of chip export restrictions

The core question: were national security concerns sidelined while Huang and the administration pursued policies that benefited Nvidia?

The financial ties are substantial. Nvidia contributed $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund and $25 million toward the White House ballroom now under construction. Huang has visited Mar-a-Lago and the White House numerous times and has traveled with the president.

Huang is credited with persuading the administration to allow sales of Nvidia's H20 and H200 chips to China, arguing that spreading the chips—and the CUDA software framework that runs them—was good for America. Nvidia also agreed to pay the U.S. government 15% of revenue from H20 sales and 25% from H200 sales.

Nvidia defended the deal last December. "The Administration's licensing process will ensure that sales of H200 to authorized customers worldwide do not deprive U.S. customers of anything—and will in fact benefit American national and economic security," spokesman John Rizzo said in a statement to Fast Company. "Offering H200 to approved and known commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, raises no cybersecurity risk and strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America."

What does this change for Nvidia and the White House?

The Commerce Department opened an investigation into Megaspeed last year, but the inquiry moved to the Department of Justice, and little is publicly known about what followed. The Warren–Coons letter seeks records that could establish what senior officials knew, why shipments to Megaspeed continued, and whether the White House disregarded security recommendations to accommodate Nvidia's commercial interests.

The stakes rise in January, when Democrats take control of Congress. Coons is expected to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has already called for an investigation into whether national security was compromised while Nvidia and the White House profited from China sales. "We need answers about the relationship between AI billionaires and the Trump administration," he wrote on X.

Nvidia, for its part, hasn't publicly explained why it accepted Huang's resignation; its SEC filing simply states the board approved his departure. The company's board may have acted less on the morality of Huang's personal conduct than on the financial and political math of keeping him in charge—and for shareholders, that math has already cost nearly a quarter of the company's market value.