Jensen Huang spy scandal puts Howard Lutnick in focus after Scott Bessent's remarks: What are his family’s Nvidia ties?
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has put Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick under fresh scrutiny over the Trump administration's handling of suspected Nvidia chip smuggling to China. Lutnick's family business ties to Nvidia and its AI partners have added another layer to the controversy.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's remarks about the handling of suspected Nvidia chip smuggling to China have brought Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick into the spotlight. Bessent said several government departments had supported placing Singapore-based Megaspeed on a restricted entity list for months, pointing to the Commerce Department as the agency responsible for taking action.
The comments have renewed attention on Lutnick's former Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, which is now run by his sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick. The firm has reported investments in Nvidia and helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for companies connected to the chipmaker's artificial intelligence business.
There is no evidence that the family's business interests influenced Lutnick's government decisions or that his sons received confidential intelligence.
Before joining Donald Trump's administration in February 2025, Lutnick headed Cantor Fitzgerald. He later transferred his ownership stake to his children through trusts.
A CNBC analysis of securities filings found that Cantor's reported Nvidia shareholding fell by nearly 50% between September 2025 and March 2026.
At the end of 2024, the firm disclosed more than 3.5 million Nvidia shares worth approximately $479 million. Their value climbed to $652 million by September 2025. However, the reported share count fell to three million in December and 1.78 million by March 2026.
Cantor has not publicly explained the reduction. It has said the Nvidia positions reported in regulatory filings largely reflected client swap transactions rather than substantial standalone investments.
The controversy goes beyond Cantor's investments. According to Axios, Lutnick received a highly classified intelligence warning about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's alleged links to a suspected Chinese spy.
The Commerce Secretary also faced pressure from White House and intelligence officials to take action against Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of helping channel Nvidia's advanced AI chips to China.
Axios reported that Lutnick repeatedly resisted efforts to crack down on the company, despite Trump authorising fresh export restrictions.
Bessent's comments have exposed divisions within the administration over the issue. He said the Treasury, Defence and State departments, along with the US Trade Representative's office, had supported placing Megaspeed on the restricted entity list for months.
Cantor's business connections extend beyond its reported Nvidia shareholding.
In September, the firm hosted Huang and other senior Nvidia executives at investor meetings in New York. Its analysts subsequently maintained an overweight rating on Nvidia shares, describing the chipmaker as an attractive investment.
The firm has also helped finance companies in Nvidia's AI ecosystem.
In May 2026, Nvidia announced a five-year cloud computing agreement worth $3.4 billion with Australian company IREN. Days later, IREN announced a $3 billion convertible bond offering, with Cantor among seven banks arranging the deal.
Cantor also advised AI infrastructure developer Lancium on a $600 million financing deal for its data centre campus in Abilene, Texas. The project is connected to Stargate, the AI infrastructure initiative backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.
The overlap between Lutnick's government responsibilities and his family's financial connections has attracted attention from ethics experts and lawmakers.
Richard Painter, a former White House chief ethics lawyer under George W Bush, told CNBC there was no proof Lutnick had shared confidential information with Cantor Fitzgerald. However, he said the appearance of a potential conflict was concerning.
Democratic lawmakers have also called for greater scrutiny of whether the Lutnick family could benefit from the administration's AI infrastructure policies.
The White House continues to back Lutnick. An official told Reuters that Trump retains complete confidence in the Commerce Secretary.
So far, there is no evidence that Lutnick's sons had advance knowledge of intelligence warnings about Huang or that Cantor's business interests influenced government decisions.
Sayantani Biswas is an assistant editor at Livemint with seven years of experience covering geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations and global power dynamics. She reports on Indian and international politics, including elections worldwide, and specialises in historically grounded analysis of contemporary conflicts and state decisions. She joined Mint in 2021, after covering politics at publications including The Telegraph. <br> She holds an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University (2019), with a specialisation in postcolonial Latin American literature. Her research examined economic nationalism through Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. She also writes on political language, cultural memory and the long shadows of conflict. <br> Biswas grew up in Durgapur, an industrial town in West Bengal shaped by migration, which drew families from across India to the Durgapur Steel Plant. As the only child in a joint family, she spent years listening—almost obsessively—to her grandparents’ testimonies of struggle, fear and loss as they fled Bangladesh during the Partition of 1947. This formative exposure to lived historical memory later converged with her training in Comparative Literature, equipping her to analyse socio-economic structures and their reverberations. <br> Outside the newsroom, she gravitates towards cultural history and critical theory, returning often to texts such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As a journalist, she is committed to accuracy, intellectual rigour and fairness, and believes political reporting demands not only clarity and speed, but historical depth, contextual precision, and a disciplined resistance to spectacle.
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