Nvidia's top lawyer invoked meetings with Trump to pressure US export officials

Nvidia's general counsel, Tim Teter, told more than a dozen government officials that he had been in a meeting with President Donald Trump and Jensen Huang to discuss the terms under which Nvidia's H200 chip could be exported to China, according to a Semafor report published Friday. On a call in January, Teter said: "He wants this to go fast." People with access to a detailed account of the call told the outlet the line went quiet after the remark.

The terms under negotiation would have required chip sellers to know who their cloud customers were before shipping, and to vet anyone buying more than a few thousand chips. Teter called the cloud-customer requirement a deal-killer for Nvidia, the report says, and pushed to raise the vetting threshold to tens of thousands of chips — purchases worth billions of dollars — while limiting end-of-life conditions to chips already under export control. In one exchange Semafor viewed, Teter accused officials drafting the restrictions of misrepresenting Nvidia's products and Trump's policies, and scolded them for not carrying out the president's agenda. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security says working with individual companies on license conditions is routine, that conditions often change in response to legitimate business concerns, and that the State, Defense, Energy and Commerce departments sign off on final versions.

On Capitol Hill, Nvidia's lobbyists told congressional staffers in 2025 that a Chip Security Act provision requiring chipmakers to locate their own chips could not be implemented. Tracking would demand entirely new technology, the company said, would be easy to spoof, and would open up cyber vulnerabilities. Former staffers told Semafor the committee spent six months going behind Nvidia to undo what the company had told other offices, and that Nvidia counted on most aides lacking the technical background to push back — a method, they said, that got a range of bills weakened. In August 2025, Nvidia's chief security officer argued in a company blog post against building backdoors and kill switches into chips.

The report also reaches into a smuggling case. Five months before the January call, Teter emailed Commerce Department agents building a case against Megaspeed, a Singapore data center company, telling them Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler had given Nvidia permission to reach out. The Justice Department took control of the probe shortly afterwards; some of its officials worried, according to the Wall Street Journal, that Kessler's contact had tainted the investigation, and the department now runs a criminal inquiry. The Commerce Department says Kessler never ordered information shared with Nvidia and that the bureau handles enforcement "by the book."

Megaspeed's former executive is Alice Huang, the suspected Chinese spy at the center of the affair that ended Jensen Huang's tenure as chief executive on Thursday. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia gave the bureau an incomplete account of its business with Megaspeed in the months after Teter's contact; Malaysian trade records show Megaspeed imported at least 17,544 of Nvidia's GB300 processors, worth about $787 million, in November 2025. Nvidia says it cut off all sales and shipments to Megaspeed in June 2025, that its outreach to Commerce was meant to help stop illegal transshipment, and that Teter knew nothing of the affair when he contacted Kessler.

The company had spent 2025 telling Congress that locating its own chips was technically impossible. Its own account of what it sold Megaspeed came up about 50,000 chips short, worth billions of dollars.