The fallout from the Nvidia Ex CEO Jensen Huang spy scandal has reached Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's family business on Wall Street.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm Lutnick headed before joining the Trump administration, cut the number of Nvidia shares it reported holding by almost half over six months. The firm is now run by his sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, according to a CNBC report.
The drop, between September 2025 and March 2026, took place while White House and US intelligence officials were urging Lutnick to take action against Megaspeed. The Singapore-based firm is suspected of channelling Nvidia's advanced AI chips into China. Axios has reported that Lutnick pushed back against those efforts on several occasions.
Accoring to CNBC report, it found nothing to show that Lutnick's sons knew about the intelligence concerns in advance. It also found nothing linking the change in Cantor's holdings to any warnings, or showing that the firm's interests swayed Lutnick's decisions.
How The Stake Shrank
Cantor reported more than 3.5 million Nvidia shares at the end of 2024, and the number stayed roughly the same until September 2025, when the holding was valued at $652 million. The count then fell to 3 million shares in December and 1.78 million by the end of March 2026, worth $310 million. At the end of June, it was 1.81 million shares.
The filings leave open why the number went down, and whether Cantor's total financial exposure to Nvidia shrank as well. Most of the shares were held by CF Secured, a Cantor brokerage unit that uses stocks and derivatives to hedge customer trades.
According to a Cantor spokesperson, the firm's own trading positions in Nvidia have only ever been “immaterial”. The holdings that show up in its quarterly filings, the spokesperson said, came from routine client swap transactions.
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Business Ties Continue
Cantor's dealings with companies in Nvidia's orbit went on regardless. In May, it was among seven bookrunners on a $3 billion convertible bond for IREN, an Australia-based cloud provider that had just struck a five-year, $3.4 billion computing deal with Nvidia.
The bond closed on May 14. On the same day, the Commerce Department cleared about 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to buy Nvidia's H200 chips. Some of those approvals, however, came before Lutnick received a classified intelligence memo about Huang's relationship with a suspected Chinese spy, which Axios reported.
Cantor also advised AI infrastructure developer Lancium on a $600 million financing deal in October 2025. Nvidia later agreed to put $2 billion into Lancium, The Information reported.
Ethics Questions
Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said there was no proof that Lutnick had passed private information to Cantor. Still, "the appearance doesn't look great", he told CNBC.
The questions follow Huang's resignation on Thursday. A White House official told Reuters that President Donald Trump has "complete confidence" in Lutnick. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said his department, along with Defense, State and the US Trade Representative's office, had backed adding Megaspeed to the entity list for months. Since Commerce maintains that list, he said, it would have to answer for its own internal processes.
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