Corp. is in for tougher scrutiny from a new Democratic majority in Congress that’s set to demand answers from Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang about whether the company is doing enough to keep its coveted artificial intelligence chips out of the hands of China and other US adversaries.

Democrats are positioned to use their powers as heads of key committees to summon executives from Nvidia and other Silicon Valley companies to testify publicly and provide information for investigations into industry practices — steps that Republicans largely avoided during the past two years of GOP control.

“I would be shocked if the incoming Congress did not press on Nvidia and Jensen,” said Masha Winchell, an emerging technology fellow at the Institute for Progress. Nvidia “claims to have no knowledge of any smuggling operations” and has denied that its chips are helping China’s military, Winchell added, but “Democrats may question whether Nvidia was willfully turning a blind eye.”Democrats don’t officially take House and Senate control until early January, when the new Congress is sworn in, but Nvidia is already coming under pressure from Capitol Hill.

On Thursday, a trio of House Republicans who head national security committees said they had asked for a briefing from Huang on his interactions with a Megaspeed International executive who the New York Times has reported is under US government investigation for allegedly spying on China’s behalf.

Nvidia didn’t respond to a request for comment on increased congressional oversight. Responding to Republicans’ request for a briefing, an Nvidia spokesperson said that Huang talks with “thousands” of customers a year. “We’re confident that if the US government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” the spokesperson said.

In an interview with Bloomberg News last week, Huang defended his dealings with Singapore-based Megaspeed, calling them “normal and not unusual.”He emphasized that his company has checked to ensure that Megaspeed didn’t illegally send Nvidia’s artificial intelligence processors to China.

“We’ve studied all their deployments of our GPUs and counted every one,” Huang said in the interview. “And I think the US government also has as well.”The prospect of intensified scrutiny from Capitol Hill has added to duress for the technology industry following Tuesday’s elections. Democratic governors-elect in Texas, Ohio and Georgia are vowing to rein in data center construction while newly passed local ballot measures also threaten to slow AI infrastructure projects.

Taken together, the political shifts fueled a global selloff Thursday in AI-exposed companies that drove the Nasdaq 100 down by 6.4% in its worst session since March 2020. Nvidia fell more than 9%, erasing $15.1 billion from Huang’s net worth and dropping the Nvidia chief to 13th place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, down from ninth. The company’s shares pared some of those losses in New York trading Friday.

Democrats are expected to put a spotlight on Silicon Valley leaders like Huang and Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg who forged close ties with President Donald Trump and endorsed the administration’s hands-off approach toward AI oversight.

Scrutiny is likely to also center on Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who contributed nearly $450 million toward Republican midterm campaign efforts. Democrats are poised to probe his sprawling Tesla Inc. and SpaceX business empire as well as his controversial efforts last year to slash the federal workforce.

For Nvidia, compliance with US export restrictions aimed at keeping its AI chips out of China promises to be a particular focus for the incoming Democratic leadership. Just last week, after the New York Times’ report that Huang may have been the target of a suspected Chinese spy, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said the Nvidia chief and his company’s board “owe Congress answers.”That demand followed months of Warren insisting that Huang testify to Congress about Nvidia’s business in China and its stance on export controls, though without subpoena power, her requests went largely unheeded.

Over the summer, Huang declined an invitation from Warren but invited the Massachusetts Democrat and other lawmakers to visit Nvidia’s headquarters.

“The American people deserve to hear why Nvidia wants to undercut American technological leadership by selling advanced AI chips to China, and whether Mr. Huang has been lobbying senators to kill bipartisan bills that would keep those chips from going to China’s military,” Warren said in a statement in July.

After criticism that it hasn’t done enough to curtail chip smuggling, Nvidia is stepping up monitoring of AI accelerators sold in Southeast Asia, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The move could provide more visibility into how Nvidia hardware moves through a region that’s long been a transshipment point for restricted goods.

Besides its chip sales, Warren has also criticized Nvidia for its circular financing and pressed Huang for more information about the company’s licensing deal with AI chip startup Groq, saying the transaction appeared structured to avoid antitrust review. During the June hearing that she had invited the Nvidia chief to join, Warren also spoke of what she called “irresponsible” debt financing to fund the AI industry.

Following the election, Warren is seen as a top contender to chair the Senate Banking Committee, where she has served as the top Democrat and which has jurisdiction over US export control programs. With the gavel, Warren would have more authority to pressure Huang to testify on both his dealmaking and his chip sales to China.

Even before the new Congress is seated on Jan. 3, lawmakers may seek to approve a slate of export-control proposals as part of a must-pass defense bill in the post-election lame-duck session. Members are negotiating three bipartisan measures — aimed at restricting sales of semiconductor-making equipment to China, codifying existing restrictions on AI chip sales and requiring the location of AI processors to be verified.

One bill, known as the AI Overwatch Act, seeks to freeze export controls in place for 18 months while giving Congress more oversight or visibility over AI chip sales to China. That bill, as submitted for the defense package by Indiana Republican Senator Jim Banks and Warren, would temporarily ensure China can only access technology that’s at least two generations behind the best US offerings.

The so-called Match Act, offered by Nebraska Republican Pete Ricketts and New Jersey Democratic Senator Andy Kim, would block sales to China of deep-immersion lithography machines, mainly sold by ASML Holding NV, and several other tools. It would require administration officials to synchronize US controls with allies, including Japan and the Netherlands, eventually mandating they establish extraterritorial jurisdiction if diplomacy fails.

The Chip Security Act, submitted by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton and supported by Warren, would require the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security to ensure that AI datacenter chips exported abroad are secured by a mechanism that can verify whether they’ve been diverted to destinations of concern like China.

The latest public version of the Chip Security Act leaves it up to BIS to decide on the mechanism, with options for it to be ping-based location verification or simpler on-site inventory checks. It also lets the administration waive any part of the requirements that it deems to be an “undue burden” on US competitiveness, if other conditions are met related to US national security and foreign supply of chips that wouldn’t be subject to the bill’s provisions.

House Democrats responsible for export controls are also likely to ramp up oversight. Representative Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat who’s the party’s top member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has expressed concern about Huang’s lobbying of Trump and joined Warren in asking the administration to hand over information about the licenses that cleared the way for the chipmaker’s H200 processors to be shipped to China.

The Trump administration decided in late 2025 to allow sales to China of those chips, which are now two generations behind Nvidia’s leading Rubin family of processors. In August 2026, Nvidia confirmed to investors that it had sold a small number of H200s to Chinese customers, however, it said that the total sold fell short of what US officials had approved, owing to objections from authorities in Beijing.

Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a California Democrat who also serves on the foreign affairs panel, said in a statement Wednesday that Democrats will have a “historic opportunity to expose and hold accountable the corruption we’ve seen under the Trump administration over the past two years,” with BIS at the “center of that effort.”