Scrutiny Mounts on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Over Wall Street Ties and Nvidia Policy Decisions

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

The Wall Street firm liked what it heard during the visit. Analysts at the firm maintained a highly optimistic outlook on the chip giant, writing that they continued to view Nvidia as offering the best risk-reward profile within their coverage universe. In an Oct. 3 research report authored by analyst C.J. Muse and his colleagues, the firm maintained a $350 price target and an overweight rating on the stock.

Yet, despite the bullish public commentary and high-level corporate access, the Wall Street brokerage 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. This stark reduction emerged from a CNBC analysis of official securities filings that excludes options contracts. Prior to the sell-off, Nvidia had consistently ranked as one of the largest stock positions reported in Cantor’s regulatory filings.

The timeline of the share reduction coincided directly with growing pressure from the White House and U.S. intelligence officials, who were actively pressing Lutnick to crack down on Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of illicitly funneling Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips to China. According to reports by Axios, Lutnick repeatedly resisted those enforcement efforts. By the time Cantor hosted Huang in New York, Lutnick had also received classified intelligence warnings regarding Huang’s ties to a suspected Chinese spy, even as the commerce secretary appeared alongside the high-profile CEO at a G20 technology summit in North Carolina.

Even as Cantor pared back its direct stock stake in Nvidia, the financial firm continued doing robust business across the broader artificial intelligence empire tied to the chipmaker. A comprehensive CNBC review of securities filings, corporate announcements, and Wall Street research revealed that the firm has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia’s business partners while maintaining exceptionally close ties to the chipmaker’s leadership.

Those overlapping commercial ties have drawn intense fresh scrutiny following Huang’s sudden resignation and recent media reports detailing Lutnick’s resistance to clamping down on companies suspected of smuggling advanced chips to China. This resistance persisted despite President Donald Trump authorizing new export restrictions on those entities for a third time on Nov. 5.

Ethics experts suggest that the complex relationship between Lutnick and the investment activities of his former firm raises legitimate questions, particularly given the sensitive national security information to which the commerce secretary was privy.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and is now a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota, noted that while there is no definitive proof that Lutnick shared nonpublic government information with Cantor Fitzgerald, the optics remain problematic.

"His conversations with his sons better be about publicly available information," Painter told CNBC, adding that the appearance of the situation does not look great.

At present, there is no evidence indicating that Lutnick’s sons had advance knowledge of ongoing intelligence concerns, that adjustments in Cantor’s reported holdings were directly tied to classified warnings, or that the firm’s commercial interests improperly influenced the commerce secretary’s official policy decisions.

A spokesperson for Cantor Fitzgerald addressed the filings by telling CNBC that the firm has historically maintained only immaterial stand-alone proprietary positions in Nvidia. The spokesperson contrasted these minor proprietary holdings with the larger positions reflected in standard 13F regulatory filings, which they explained were entered into in the ordinary course of business to facilitate client swap transactions common in institutional markets.

Cantor declined to answer additional questions from CNBC. Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce, the White House, Howard Lutnick, and his sons all declined to respond to repeated requests for comment or detailed inquiries regarding the findings.

As scrutiny surrounding Huang and export controls intensified, Cantor Chairman Brandon Lutnick publicly praised the chipmaker’s leadership during a media appearance. "Nvidia is one of the great companies on the planet, and they have an amazing leadership team," Brandon Lutnick told Fox Business.

President Trump has continued to stand firmly behind his commerce secretary. A White House official confirmed to Reuters that the president maintains "complete confidence" in Lutnick’s leadership.

However, visible cracks in the administration’s internal unity emerged when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNBC’s "Squawk Box" to discuss the interagency dynamics surrounding trade enforcement. Bessent revealed that the Departments of Treasury, Defense, and State, alongside the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, "were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months."

Pointing directly to the Commerce Department as the agency ultimately responsible for managing and enforcing the entity list—which identifies restricted commercial entities—Bessent added that reporters would "have to ask them about their internal processes."

A shrinking Nvidia position

Nvidia had previously stood as Cantor’s second-largest reported stock position before Howard Lutnick left Wall Street to join the cabinet in February 2025, trailing only the cryptocurrency investment firm MicroStrategy, which has since been renamed Strategy. At the close of 2024, the brokerage disclosed holding more than 3.5 million Nvidia shares valued at approximately $479 million, according to quarterly securities disclosures.

That share count remained steady through September 2025, while its total market value climbed 36% to $652 million as the Trump administration moved over the summer months to ease restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 chip sales to China.

Over the subsequent six months, however, the reported number of Nvidia shares held by Cantor plummeted by 49%, dropping to 3 million shares in December and further down to 1.78 million shares by the end of March 2026. Consequently, the total reported value fell from $652 million to $310 million, based on the CNBC analysis of regulatory filings.

Simultaneously, pressure on Howard Lutnick was mounting on Capitol Hill. In March, Sens. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., urged the commerce secretary to suspend or reconsider Nvidia’s export licenses after three individuals linked to Super Micro Computer, a major Nvidia customer, were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to smuggle restricted AI chips to China.

"The Trump administration, I think, leaks like a sieve when it comes to non-public government information getting to various hedge fund guys," Painter observed, reiterating that no concrete evidence links Howard Lutnick to any direct sharing of classified data with his family’s firm.

While regulatory filings do not definitively explain why Cantor’s reported share count declined or whether its overall financial exposure to Nvidia shifted, market conditions fluctuated significantly. Nvidia’s stock price more than doubled from its April 2025 lows by late October before pulling back in subsequent months. Overall, the stock dropped roughly 6.5% between the end of September and the end of March.

Cantor’s reported Nvidia holdings remained near those reduced levels through June 30, the final quarter covered by public disclosures, hovering around 1.81 million shares.

The vast majority of those reported shares were attributed to CF Secured, a Cantor brokerage subsidiary that utilizes equities and derivatives to hedge customer transactions, according to audited financial statements. Furthermore, Cantor disclosed substantial options positions in Nvidia during the examined timeframe, which were heavily weighted toward put options designed to protect against potential declines in the stock price.

Classified warnings and a $3 billion deal

As intelligence concerns regarding Huang escalated within the administration in May, Cantor was simultaneously helping finance the rapid expansion of one of Nvidia’s primary business partners, securities filings demonstrate.

On May 7, Nvidia and Australia-based cloud computing provider IREN announced a massive five-year, $3.4 billion cloud computing contract alongside a strategic partnership granting the chipmaker the right to invest up to $2.1 billion into IREN.

"That’s not a passive financial investment. Nvidia is a partner who wins as we deliver," IREN co-CEO Daniel Roberts told investors during a quarterly earnings call held that same day.

Just five days later, as President Trump traveled to China aboard Air Force One, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly warned him about Huang’s interactions with a suspected Chinese spy, according to The New York Times. Huang, who had not originally been slated to join the presidential entourage, subsequently joined the delegation during a refueling stop in Alaska.

Reports from Axios confirmed that Howard Lutnick had already received a highly classified intelligence memorandum outlining similar concerns surrounding Huang’s associations.

On May 12, the exact day Trump departed for Asia, IREN announced the pricing of a convertible bond offering that ultimately raised $3 billion upon its closure two days later. Cantor Fitzgerald served as one of seven bookrunners on the lucrative transaction, working alongside major financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

On May 14, the day that bond offering officially closed, the Commerce Department quietly cleared approximately 10 Chinese companies—including tech giants Alibaba and ByteDance—to purchase Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips, though officials noted some of those approvals predated the intelligence memo.

While the exact timing of IREN’s engagement with Cantor and the exact financial windfall for the brokerage remain undisclosed, Cantor subsequently reported holding a substantial financial position in IREN’s stock.

By the end of June, Cantor disclosed holding $115 million in IREN shares alongside $362 million in Nvidia shares. Together, the two entities accounted for more than 9% of the total value of Cantor’s reported $5.2 billion securities portfolio, excluding options, according to the CNBC analysis.

Beyond the stock

IREN was far from the sole corporate entity within Nvidia’s sprawling ecosystem to seek out Cantor for high-level financial services and debt arrangement.

In October 2025, Cantor advised artificial intelligence infrastructure developer Lancium on a $600 million debt financing package designed to support its massive data center campus development in Abilene, Texas. That facility serves as the inaugural site for Stargate, an ambitious, multi-billion-dollar AI infrastructure initiative backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle.

Newmark, a prominent commercial real estate advisory firm controlled by Cantor, also played a direct role in funding the Abilene campus by successfully arranging a $7.1 billion construction loan in May 2025.

Months later, Nvidia agreed to commit $2 billion for an approximate 20% equity stake in Lancium, with an additional $1 billion tied to future developmental milestones, according to reports from The Information. Lancium, which also maintains backing from private equity firm Blackstone, officially confirmed a strategic investment and technology partnership on Aug. 24, though specific financial figures were not publicly detailed at the time.

Cantor’s commercial reach also intersected with key nodes in Nvidia’s intricate global supply chain.

In May 2025, shortly after Howard Lutnick announced the transfer of his ownership interest in Cantor Fitzgerald to his children via dedicated trusts, Semafor reported that bankers at the firm had informally advised executives at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the vital foundry responsible for fabricating Nvidia’s most advanced processors, on navigating political and regulatory dynamics in Washington. Cantor formally characterized that reporting as baseless and false.

TSMC remains a primary recipient of billions of dollars in federal subsidies established under bipartisan legislation and administered directly by the Commerce Department to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity in Arizona and other key locations.

These intersecting financial arrangements prompted Democratic lawmakers to demand formal investigations. In December, a group of senators called for an ethics inquiry to determine whether the Lutnick family stood to benefit financially from the administration’s aggressive push to expand power-intensive AI data centers across the country.

The legislative pressure continued as Sens. Warren and Chris Coons, D-Del., sent formal letters demanding that Howard Lutnick, Marco Rubio, and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller preserve all internal records concerning Nvidia chip exports to China and the intelligence community’s warnings regarding Jensen Huang.

Lawmakers have increasingly criticized the executive branch’s handling of export controls. Appearing on CNBC’s "Squawk Box," Sen. Coons argued that the administration faltered by listening too closely to corporate leadership regarding advanced chip sales.

"The place where I think the Trump administration has most failed here is in being persuaded by Jensen Huang and others to license the export of some advanced chips," Coons said, expressing ongoing concern that federal regulators have effectively turned a blind eye to burgeoning black markets for high-end artificial intelligence hardware.