Howard Lutnick’s sons’ Nvidia ties amid Jensen Huang China spy scandal

In late September, Cantor Fitzgerald hosted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other top executives from the chipmaker for investor meetings in New York, according to a Cantor research report reviewed by CNBC.

The Wall Street firm liked what it heard.

“We continue to view NVDA as the best risk/reward in our coverage,” Cantor analyst C.J. Muse and his colleagues wrote in a research report dated Oct. 3 that maintained a $350 price target and overweight rating on the stock.

Yet the firm formerly run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now led by his sons, Brandon and Kyle, reported a nearly 50% decline in the number of Nvidia shares it held between September 2025 and March 2026, according to a CNBC analysis of securities filings that excludes options. Nvidia had been one of the largest stock positions reported in Cantor’s filings.

The decline coincided with White House and U.S. intelligence officials pressing Lutnick to crack down on Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of funneling Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips to China. Lutnick repeatedly resisted those efforts, according to Axios.

By the time Cantor hosted Huang in New York, Lutnick had also received a classified intelligence warning, according to Axios, about Huang’s ties to a suspected Chinese spy and had appeared alongside the CEO at a G20 technology summit in North Carolina.

Even as Cantor pared back its Nvidia stake, it continued doing business across the chipmaker’s AI empire. A CNBC review of securities filings, corporate announcements and Wall Street research found the firm has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia’s business partners while maintaining close ties to the chipmaker’s leadership.

Those ties have drawn fresh scrutiny following Huang’s resignation Thursday and Axios’ reporting that Lutnick repeatedly resisted a crackdown on companies suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China, despite President Donald Trump authorizing new export restrictions on those companies for a third time on Nov. 5.

An ethics expert said the relationship between Lutnick and his former firm’s investments may raise questions, given what the secretary knew about Nvidia.

Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and now a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota said that while “there’s no proof of” Lutnick sharing nonpublic information with Cantor Fitzgerald, “the appearance doesn’t look great.”

“His conversations with his sons better be about publicly available information,” Painter told CNBC.

There is no evidence that Lutnick’s sons had advance knowledge of the intelligence concerns, that changes in Cantor’s reported holdings were tied to any warnings or that the firm’s business interests influenced their father’s…