“He Wants This To Go Fast”: Nvidia’s Top Lawyer Kept Name-Dropping Trump To Strong-Arm Regulators, According To Report

Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter told more than a dozen government officials working on terms & conditions for the company’s H200 chip exports to China that he was in a meeting with President Trump and Jensen Huang to discuss the issue, Semafor reported Friday.

“He wants this to go fast,” Teter said on the January call, according to people with access to a detailed account of it. The line went quiet.

In order to remain compliant, chip sellers would be required to know who their cloud customers were before shipping and to vet anyone buying more than a few thousand chips (recall China’s ‘technically legal’ loophole). Teter called the cloud-customer requirement a deal-killer for Nvidia, and the company pushed to raise the vetting threshold to the tens of thousands of chips, billions of dollars’ worth, and to limit end-of-life conditions to chips already under export controls.

According to the report, Teter bandied about DC name-dropping Trump to try and grease gears. In one exchange the outlet viewed, he accused officials drafting export 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, meanwhile, said it is routine for agencies to work with individual companies on license conditions, which often change in response to legitimate business concerns, and that the State, Defense, Energy and Commerce departments sign off on the final versions.

The Megaspeed Calls

Five months before that call, Teter emailed the Commerce Department agents building a smuggling case against Megaspeed, telling them Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler had given Nvidia permission to reach out, as we reported. Megaspeed is the Singapore data center company whose former executive, Alice Huang, is the suspected Chinese spy Jensen Huang has acknowledged a relationship with.

The Justice Department took control of the probe shortly afterward, with some officials there worried that Kessler’s contact with Nvidia “had tainted the investigation,” the Wall Street Journal reported. DOJ now runs a criminal inquiry. Commerce says Kessler never ordered information shared with Nvidia and that the bureau handles enforcement by the book.

Nvidia gave the bureau an incomplete account of its business with Megaspeed in the months after Teter’s late-summer 2025 call to Kessler, Bloomberg reported.

Nvidia told Bloomberg that Teter didn’t know about Huang’s affair when he contacted Kessler, and says its outreach to Commerce was meant to provide information and help stop illegal transshipment. The company says it cut off all sales and shipments to Megaspeed in June 2025. Malaysian trade records show Megaspeed imported at least 17,544 of Nvidia’s GB300 processors, worth about $787 million, in November 2025, according to Bloomberg.

Huang, who resigned as CEO on Thursday, has said there was no evidence Nvidia’s chips were being diverted to China. Bloomberg has since reported that the Megaspeed sales Nvidia disclosed to the US government came up about 50,000 chips short, worth billions of dollars.

The Tracking Nvidia Said It Couldn’t Build

Nvidia told congressional staffers in 2025 that a Chip Security Act provision requiring chipmakers to be able to locate their chips couldn’t be done, former staffers told Semafor. It would take entirely new technology, the company said, and even then the tracking would be easy to spoof.

Nvidia’s lobbyists also warned committee staff that location tracking would open up cyber vulnerabilities. One former staffer said the committee spent six months going behind Nvidia to undo what it had told other offices. Others said the company counted on most Hill aides lacking the technical background to push back, and got a range of bills weakened that way.

In August 2025, Nvidia’s chief security officer argued in a company blog post that building backdoors and kill switches into chips “would be a gift to hackers and hostile actors.” Reuters reported the post as Nvidia urging Washington against location verification.

Four months later, Nvidia confirmed to Reuters that it had built location verification software, as we noted at the time. It had been demonstrating the feature privately for months, and launched it in May. One former staffer accused Nvidia of lying to Congress about whether tracking was feasible while it was building the feature into its next generation of chips.

Megaspeed Still Isn’t Blacklisted

Officials were weighing whether to add Megaspeed to the Commerce Department’s Entity List as early as spring 2025, a former State Department official told Semafor, earlier than previously reported. A former Commerce official said the department can blacklist a company extremely fast when it wants to.

As we noted on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent allegedly confronted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in the White House Situation Room on Nov. 5 over why Megaspeed still isn’t on the list; Commerce denied the exchange took place. On Friday, Bessent said Treasury, War, USTR and State “were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months,” and Lutnick agreed to testify before the Senate Banking Committee.