Nvidia is cozying up to China with Shanghai R&D lab plans, Senators cry

Banks and Warren accuse chip maker of habitual 'disregard for US national security and support for autocratic regimes'

Nvidia is reportedly planning to open a new research and development facility in Shanghai, China, drawing sharp criticism from a pair of US lawmakers.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Senator Jim Banks (R-IN) sent a letter [PDF] to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressing concern that the planned facility could support China's access to advanced AI hardware and software, which are subject to US export controls.

"No American company should be helping the Chinese Communist Party close the AI gap," Banks said in a statement. "NVIDIA was built by American innovation and taxpayer-funded research, not by empowering our adversaries." 

According to the letter, plans for the R&D facility are just the latest example of Nvidia cozying up to China, which the pair said "demonstrates a disregard for US national security and support for autocratic regimes." 

The letter argues that the reported plans, intended to better understand local customer needs, could expose Nvidia to pressure from the Chinese government to comply with "special conditions on foreign companies," posing serious risks to US national and economic security.

A Nvidia spokesperson told The Register that, rather than being a new facility that would result in advanced chip designs ending up in Chinese hands, the biz is "simply leasing a new space for existing employees, who need the room in the post-Covid return to work." 

The scope of that work would remain unchanged, the spokesperson told us.

This echoes what Huang said at the Computex conference in Taiwan last week, when he stated they were simply opening a new office because "we do not have enough chairs," adding, "if one person types, the other person has to stop."

Warren and Banks are skeptical, claiming that Nvidia's core intellectual property "exists primarily as knowledge and digital designs" that would be easy to transfer to Chinese experts without physical evidence or an export license to do so. 

"[Nvidia] needs to answer questions about whether it is prioritizing its bottom line by chasing business in China at the expense of American leadership, security, and prosperity," Warren said. 

Jensen in the crosshairs

The Nvidia CEO hasn't hidden his contempt for US export controls that have cost his company billions as it had to forgo planned shipments of H20 chips to China. 

While the GPU giant still posted record profits for the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, Nvidia predicted on Wednesday's earnings call that export control rules would cause it to miss out on $10.5 billion in previously anticipated revenue in the first half of its fiscal year. 

Huang talked up China during the call, describing it as one of the world's largest AI markets and "a springboard" to Nvidia's global success that was "effectively closed to the US industry." 

"Shielding Chinese chipmakers from US competition only strengthens them abroad and weakens America's position," Huang said on the earnings call. "The question is not whether China will have AI, it already does. The question is whether one of the world's largest AI markets will run on American platforms."

It's a familiar tune for Huang. The Nvidia chief called US GPU export control rules "precisely wrong" and "a failure" at Computex last week - and that was after the Trump administration threw out so-called "diffusion" rules that would've restricted chip sales to a wide number of countries not on America's close-friends list. 

Huang has until June 20 to provide Warren and Banks with answers. ®