Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Faces Senate Testimony on China Chip Sales

Senator Elizabeth Warren invited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to testify before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on June 11 about the chipmaker’s China business and US export control compliance, citing active federal enforcement cases that directly contradict Huang’s public claims of zero chip diversion and zero China market share.

The invitation, dated June 4, came paired with a second letter she sent the same day to Nvidia’s general counsel and audit committee chair. That letter names three active Department of Justice enforcement dockets involving hundreds of millions of dollars in allegedly diverted Nvidia chips, a short-seller report claiming illegal diversion still drives a portion of Nvidia’s China revenue, and public statements the Nvidia chief executive has made that the criminal record does not support. Warren asked him to confirm his attendance by June 8.

The Letter Behind the Invitation

Warren sent two documents on June 4. The hearing invitation offered Huang five minutes of oral testimony at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, with questions from any senator in attendance. The governance letter to Nvidia’s general counsel and audit committee chair demanded written answers to three specific questions by June 18.

The governance letter asks whether Nvidia’s audit committee has evaluated the alleged unlawful diversion of its products as a material legal or regulatory risk; whether the board has assessed the company’s export-control compliance since a March 2026 indictment, which Warren’s letter links to Super Micro Computer Inc. (commonly known as Supermicro, one of Nvidia’s listed commercial partners), charged three individuals with conspiring to divert AI chip-loaded servers to Chinese customers; and whether Nvidia has commissioned any independent review of those compliance programs since the indictment.

The letter flags that Nvidia continues to list Supermicro in its partner network, that Supermicro has publicly said it is expanding that relationship, and that reports allege Nvidia cloud partners in Southeast Asia may have routed export-controlled chips to Alibaba through a Thailand-based company. Warren frames all three details as a question of board awareness and the company’s response to known compliance risks. Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment ahead of publication.

A governance letter of this kind is a different instrument from a hearing invitation. It places specific questions to the audit committee and general counsel on the record, creating a documented trail of whether those questions were answered and to what standard, with potential securities-disclosure implications that a single Senate appearance does not carry on its own.

How Washington Kept Narrowing the Gate

The regulatory history of Nvidia in China runs through four chip generations and four separate policy moves, each one closing a gap the company had engineered to stay open.

The Biden administration imposed initial export controls on advanced graphics processing units (GPUs, the chips used to train large AI models) in October 2022, blocking the A100 and H100 from Chinese buyers. Nvidia responded with the A800 and H800, downgraded variants built to fall just below the new restriction thresholds. Washington tightened those thresholds in October 2023, catching the modified chips too. Nvidia’s answer was the H20, built on the older Hopper architecture with deliberately capped interconnect speeds. For roughly 18 months it was the best hardware Chinese data centers could legally buy, and demand stayed strong: domestic AI companies faced surging computing needs and few alternatives that matched Nvidia’s performance at scale.

In April 2025, the Trump administration told Nvidia it needed a license to export the H20, forcing a $4.5 billion charge against first-quarter earnings in fiscal year 2026. The Trump administration has since opened a licensing pathway for H200 exports to specific Chinese customers, but per Nvidia’s quarterly filing for the period ending April 26, 2026, the company has not generated any revenue under that program; H200 units must clear a US inspection process before any shipment, and none had been approved as of that date.

Three Active DOJ Cases

Warren’s governance letter cites three categories of DOJ enforcement actions involving Nvidia products, all currently active criminal proceedings.

• $160 million in H100 and H200 chips allegedly relabeled with a fictional brand name to evade export documentation requirements, resulting in two arrests in December 2025 and a prior guilty plea from a Houston business owner in a connected case
• Millions of dollars in Nvidia GPUs illegally routed to China through a November 2025 indictment alleging exports via Malaysia and Thailand, in which a Tampa, Florida front company falsified shipping paperwork and misclassified recipients across transactions running from September 2023 through November 2025
• $510 million in servers loaded with restricted Nvidia chips, the subject of a March 2026 indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court charging three individuals with moving the hardware to Chinese customers; the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York described the scheme as carried out through “a tangled web of lies, obfuscation, and concealment”

The three cases span distinct operational methods. The relabeling scheme created a fictitious brand to absorb the documentation requirement. The Malaysian and Thai routing ran for more than two years through a US front company. The servers case deployed dummy units specifically designed to mislead customs inspectors. Each approach moved restricted hardware for a period before federal agencies intervened.

Short-seller Culper Research, which stands to profit if Nvidia shares fall, alleged that more than 20% of Nvidia’s fiscal year 2026 compute revenues came from China, sustained by illegal diversion through Southeast Asian intermediaries. Warren cited the Culper report in her governance letter alongside the criminal filings as corroborating context for the board oversight questions.

Nvidia has maintained publicly that there is “no evidence of any AI chip diversion” and that its China market share has “dropped to zero.” Those specific characterizations are the direct targets of both the hearing invitation and the governance letter, and they are likely to be among the first questions senators put to Huang if he appears on June 11.

Nvidia’s China Footprint in 2026

IDC (International Data Corporation), the market research firm, published data in April showing Nvidia held roughly 55% of China’s AI accelerator card market across full-year 2025, shipping an estimated 2.2 million cards out of approximately 4 million total units. That is down from near-total dominance of about 95% before export controls took effect in 2022, but it is majority market share in a market Nvidia claims to have vacated. Huawei, whose Ascend chip line has grown under sustained domestic investment and government procurement mandates, shipped roughly 812,000 chips for about 20% of the same market. Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual report for the second straight year.

In public statements to investors, Nvidia reported China revenue had fallen to roughly half of pre-export control levels. The company’s chief executive separately acknowledged that Nvidia had “essentially ceded the Chinese AI chip market to Huawei.” In October 2025, the same executive told reporters that export controls had taken Nvidia’s China share from 95% to “zero” – the characterization IDC’s April 2026 data directly contradicts. Per Nvidia’s annual report, China is the company’s fourth-largest revenue region, after the United States, Singapore, and Taiwan. NVDA shares fell about 1% in after-hours trading on June 4 following initial reports of the hearing invitation.

• ~55% estimated AI accelerator card market share in China, full-year 2025, per IDC data published April 2026 (down from ~95% pre-controls)
• Nvidia shipped approximately 2.2 million accelerator cards to China in 2025, per IDC estimates reported by Reuters
• China revenue at approximately half of pre-export control levels, per prior investor communications
• Zero H200 revenue generated in China as of April 26, 2026, per Nvidia’s own quarterly filing

Congress Converges on Export Controls

The senator went public with her argument on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on June 4, before the letters were released.

The Chinese, in effect, buy our stuff, and American companies make a profit doing that. But it certainly undermines our long-term security.

She told the program the chips reaching China are “not just chips to help the AI industry in general” but “are actually used for military purposes.”

The scrutiny isn’t coming from one party. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee launched a separate investigation around the same time, focused on China’s efforts to impede US AI and data-center development. Her letter states that “Congress has made bipartisan efforts to strengthen export controls on restricted entities, but these efforts are undermined when corporations ignore the diversion of prohibited exports.” Both committees have now publicly centered the same enforcement question on the same company, arriving from different starting points within the same week.

The Beijing Backdrop

Three weeks before the governance letters arrived, Nvidia’s chief executive was not originally scheduled to be part of the White House trip to China at all.

His name was absent from a delegation roster released by a White House official on May 12. After media coverage flagged the omission, Trump called him directly. Huang flew to Alaska to board Air Force One and arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport on May 13 alongside Trump and Elon Musk, photographed on the tarmac as the delegation met Chinese officials.

“President Trump asked me to come,” Huang told reporters at the summit. He described the trip as an opportunity for the two countries to “rely on the relationships to build a much, much better partnership.”

That visit now sits at the center of Warren’s case. Nvidia’s chief executive traveled to Beijing as a commercial representative of the United States while federal prosecutors were actively pursuing criminal cases involving Nvidia’s chips flowing to Chinese buyers through illegal channels. The Trump administration loosened export restrictions in stages to allow Nvidia back into the Chinese market; the DOJ filed enforcement actions against the people moving chips outside those permitted channels on a parallel timeline. A Senate appearance would put both tracks on the record at the same time, in the same room.

The hearing carries no legal compulsion; Warren cannot compel Huang’s attendance. His confirmation deadline is June 8.