Howard Lutnick Has Got to Go

Opinion|Howard Lutnick Has Got to Go

Jensen Huang, until Thursday the head of Nvidia, one of the world’s most valuable corporations, abruptly resigned his post following his admission of an extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Now an even bigger scandal is developing at the Department of Commerce, whose secretary, Howard Lutnick, bears almost as much responsibility for this brewing crisis as Mr. Huang.

Nvidia dominates the market for chips needed to drive artificial intelligence. Its cutting-edge chips have been deemed so critical to our national security that they cannot be sold to Chinese companies. Clearly, Mr. Huang demonstrated terrible judgment in being intimate with a woman who is not only suspected of working for China’s intelligence apparatus but whose firm is believed to be diverting banned Nvidia chips to China. But it was Mr. Lutnick who made the decision not to enforce export controls designed to counter chip smuggling, making Mr. Huang a potential target. (China has rejected the espionage claims.)

It is largely Mr. Lutnick’s fault that Megaspeed, the company that employed the alleged spy, successfully smuggled a reported $7 billion of Nvidia chips into China (a number that no doubt represents the tip of the iceberg). His actions created the conditions for this crisis to occur, conditions that have allowed China to remain competitive with the United States in the race for A.I. supremacy.

Mr. Lutnick must resign his post so the cleanup can commence.

In January 2025, the Biden administration imposed new export controls expressly to combat Chinese chip smuggling. These controls required unvetted companies in most countries to receive an export license from the Commerce Department before making any large A.I. chip purchase. Mr. Lutnick, who took his post the following month, never allowed these controls to go into effect. Mr. Huang was already building what would become a close relationship with the new president and Mr. Lutnick, and Nvidia long maintained that there was “no evidence” that restricted chips were being diverted to China. In May of that year, the Commerce Department announced that it would not enforce the controls, saying it would eventually replace them with other anti-smuggling measures.

The department never published a replacement rule. It didn’t even bother to officially rescind the Biden administration’s controls. Instead, Mr. Lutnick effectively outsourced the job of vetting whether a given company posed a risk of diversion to China to the private sector, for example to Nvidia and to A.I. server suppliers such as Supermicro.

The consequences of his decision have been catastrophic. Chip smuggling is running rampant. Taiwanese customs data shows that from 2025 to 2026, over $60 billion worth of A.I. chips were most likely shipped to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, making these three relatively small countries among the largest importers of A.I. chips in the world.