If Trump was Huang’s friend in the White House, Teter was his muscle in Washington. After more than two decades at law firm Cooley LLP, Teter joined Nvidia in 2017, shortly after the chipmaker announced the start of the “age of AI computing.” Nvidia’s GPUs sparked the “big bang” of modern AI, Huang wrote at the time, years before Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company.
But as Nvidia became a larger geopolitical force — and Huang became a fixture alongside Trump in meetings, dinners and the Oval Office — Huang and Teter developed a “scorched earth, antagonistic attitude,” according to a former government official familiar with their presence in Washington. “They’re making things more personal, going after think tanks, government officials, etc.,” the former official said, referring to reports that Nvidia targeted company critics and export control supporters.
As he bulldozed through Washington, Teter regularly invoked President Trump’s name to advance Nvidia’s agenda. In an exchange seen by Semafor, Teter accused government officials crafting export restrictions of misrepresenting Nvidia’s products and President Trump’s policies, chastising them for not implementing Trump’s agenda and insisting that Trump deserved their support. Teter and Nvidia’s lobbying team often capitalized about their implicit support from the White House and the fact that most Hill staffers lacked the technical expertise to counter the company’s claims that certain restrictions were not technically feasible, even if they were later proven to be false, current and former members of Congress told Semafor. Employees “kind of believed everything they were told” and Nvidia would see all sorts of watered-down bills, one employee said.
Nvidia’s “MO has largely been tweeting,” creating an “intense trust deficit between the government, the Hill and Nvidia,” a former staffer said. And “obviously the canonical example at this point is Nvidia denying” inappropriate chip sales to China, this person said.
Huang said there was no evidence the chips were being diverted to China, but Bloomberg reported that Nvidia undercounted Megaspeed’s reported sales to the U.S. government by 50,000 chips, worth billions of dollars. Companies linked to Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy, have purchased at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips since 2023, The Information reported.
But long before Nvidia came under fire for its relationship with Megaspeed, Nvidia told its staff that a provision of the 2025 Chip Security Act, which would require chipmakers to be able to localize their chips, was doomed to failure. “They basically said it wasn’t technically feasible,” the former staffer said, “they were like, ‘we would need completely new technology to do this, and even if we did, it would be very easily usurpable.'”
In meetings with committee staff, Nvidia lobbyists argued that location verification would create security vulnerabilities. They “started this line of bullshit about how the Chip Security Act was going to create all these cyber vulnerabilities,” a second former staffer said. “We spent six months following them and unpacking all the crap they were saying to other offices.”
Then, in December, Reuters reported on a new location verification technology feature, which Nvidia had been privately demonstrating for months. The feature launched in May, meaning the company had “lied to Congress about the technical feasibility when you were literally building it into your next generation of chips,” this person said.
Nvidia declined to comment on location verification technology.
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