Lutnick faces questions over Nvidia spy scandal. His sons’ firm has deep ties to the chipmaker - CNBC
In late September, Cantor Fitzgerald hosted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and other top executives from the chipmaker for investor meetings in New York, according to a Cantor research report reviewed by CNBC.
The Wall Street firm liked what it heard.
"We continue to view NVDA as the best risk/reward in our coverage," Cantor analyst C.J. Muse and his colleagues wrote in a research report dated Oct. 3 that maintained a $350 price target and overweight rating on the stock.
Yet the firm 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, according to a CNBC analysis of securities filings that excludes options. Nvidia had been one of the largest stock positions reported in Cantor's filings.
The decline coincided with White House and U.S. intelligence officials pressing Lutnick to crack down on Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of funneling Nvidia's advanced artificial intelligence chips to China. Lutnick repeatedly resisted those efforts, according to Axios.
By the time Cantor hosted Huang in New York, Lutnick had also received a classified intelligence warning, according to Axios, about Huang's ties to a suspected Chinese spy and had appeared alongside the CEO at a G20 technology summit in North Carolina.
Even as Cantor pared back its Nvidia stake, it continued doing business across the chipmaker's AI empire. A CNBC review of securities filings, corporate announcements and Wall Street research found the firm has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia's business partners while maintaining close ties to the chipmaker's leadership.
Those ties have drawn fresh scrutiny following Huang's resignation Thursday and Axios' reporting that Lutnick repeatedly resisted a crackdown on companies suspected of smuggling Nvidia chips to China, despite President Donald Trump authorizing new export restrictions on those companies for a third time on Nov. 5.
An ethics expert said the relationship between Lutnick and his former firm's investments may raise questions, given what the secretary knew about Nvidia.
Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and now a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota said that while "there's no proof of" Lutnick sharing nonpublic information with Cantor Fitzgerald, "the appearance doesn't look great."
"His conversations with his sons better be about publicly available information," Painter told CNBC.
There is no evidence that Lutnick's sons had advance knowledge of the intelligence concerns, that changes in Cantor's reported holdings were tied to any warnings or that the firm's business interests influenced their father's decisions.
"Cantor has to date from time to time had only immaterial stand-alone proprietary positions in Nvidia, unlike the positions reflected in 13F filings which were entered into in the ordinary course of business in connection with client swap transactions, that are common in institutional markets," a Cantor spokesperson told CNBC.
Cantor declined to answer CNBC's other questions. The Commerce Department, the White House, Howard Lutnick and his sons did not respond to CNBC's requests for comment or detailed questions about the findings.
As scrutiny of Huang intensified, Cantor Chairman Brandon Lutnick was publicly praising the chipmaker's leadership. "Nvidia is one of the great companies on the planet, and they have an amazing leadership team," Brandon Lutnick told Fox Business on Wednesday.
Trump is standing by Howard Lutnick. A White House official told Reuters on Thursday that the president maintains "complete confidence" in the commerce secretary.
But cracks in the administration's unity emerged Friday, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC's "Squawk Box" that the Departments of Treasury, Defense and State and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative all "were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months."
Bessent pointed to Commerce as the department responsible for imposing the entity list, which identifies restricted businesses and other groups, adding, "You will have to ask them about their internal processes."
Nvidia was Cantor's second-largest reported stock position before Howard Lutnick left Wall Street to become commerce secretary in February 2025, behind only bitcoin investor MicroStrategy, now known as Strategy. At the end of 2024, the firm disclosed more than 3.5 million Nvidia shares worth $479 million, according to its quarterly securities filing.
That share count held steady through September 2025, but its value climbed 36% to $652 million, according to Cantor's quarterly securities filing, as the Trump administration moved over the summer to ease restrictions on Nvidia's H20 chip sales to China.
Over the following six months, however, the number of Nvidia shares Cantor reported holding fell by 49%, to 3 million in December and 1.78 million by the end of March 2026, with their value dropping from $652 million to $310 million, according to a CNBC analysis of securities filings.
Pressure on Howard Lutnick was also mounting on Capitol Hill. Sens. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in March urged the secretary to suspend or reconsider Nvidia's export licenses after three people linked to Nvidia customer Super Micro Computer were indicted on charges of conspiring to smuggle 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 said, though he stressed there is no evidence Howard Lutnick had shared such information with his sons.
The filings do not establish why Cantor's reported share count fell or whether its overall financial exposure to Nvidia declined. Nvidia’s stock had more than doubled from its April 2025 lows by late October, before retreating in the following months. The stock fell about 6.5% between the end of September and the end of March.
Cantor's reported Nvidia holdings remained near that lower level through June 30, the latest quarter covered by public disclosures, at 1.81 million shares. Its next quarterly filing is due Monday.
Cantor has not publicly explained the decline.
Most of those shares were attributed to CF Secured, a Cantor brokerage subsidiary that uses stocks and derivatives to hedge customer transactions, according to its audited financial statements. Cantor also disclosed substantial Nvidia options positions during the time period CNBC examined, overwhelmingly skewed toward put options, which can protect against declines in the stock price.
As concerns about Huang escalated inside the Trump administration in May, according to Axios, Cantor was helping finance the expansion of one of Nvidia's newest business partners, securities filings show.
On May 7, Nvidia and Australia-based cloud computing provider IREN announced a five-year, $3.4 billion cloud computing contract and a strategic partnership giving the chipmaker the right to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN.
"That's not a passive financial investment. Nvidia is a partner who wins as we deliver," IREN co-CEO Daniel Roberts told investors on the company's quarterly earnings call that day.
Five days later, as Trump headed to China aboard Air Force One, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned him about Huang's relationship with a suspected Chinese spy, The New York Times reported on Tuesday. Huang, who had not initially been invited on the trip, joined the president's delegation during a refueling stop in Alaska.
Howard Lutnick had already been sent a highly classified intelligence memo detailing concerns about Huang's relationship, Axios reported.
On May 12, the day Trump departed for China, IREN announced the pricing of a convertible bond offering that ultimately raised $3 billion when it closed two days later. Cantor was one of seven bookrunners on the deal, alongside JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.
On the day the offering closed, May 14, Lutnick's Commerce Department quietly cleared roughly 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, to buy Nvidia's advanced H200 chips, though some of those approvals predated the intelligence memo.
It is unclear when IREN hired Cantor for the offering or how much the firm earned from the deal. Cantor declined to answer CNBC's questions about its work with IREN.
Still, Cantor reported a substantial position in IREN's stock.
By the end of June, Cantor reported $115 million in IREN shares and $362 million in Nvidia shares. Together, the two companies accounted for more than 9% of the value of Cantor's reported $5.2 billion in securities holdings, excluding options, according to CNBC's analysis of the filing.
Cantor didn't answer CNBC's questions about its work with IREN.
IREN was not the only company in Nvidia's orbit that turned to Cantor for financing.
In October 2025, Cantor advised AI infrastructure developer Lancium on a $600 million financing deal to support its data center campus in Abilene, Texas, the first site of Stargate, the massive AI infrastructure project backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.
Newmark, a commercial real estate firm controlled by Cantor, also helped finance the Abilene campus, arranging a $7.1 billion construction loan in May 2025.
Ten months later, Nvidia agreed to invest $2 billion for a roughly 20% stake in Lancium, with up to $1 billion more tied to future milestones, The Information reported in August. Lancium, which is also backed by Blackstone, confirmed an investment and a technology partnership on Aug. 24 without disclosing financial terms.
It's unclear whether Cantor continued advising Lancium after the financing deal or played a role in Nvidia's investment. Neither Cantor nor Lancium responded to questions about the investment.
Cantor's reported ties also extend to Nvidia's supply chain.
In May 2025, days after Howard Lutnick announced the transfer of his ownership stake in Cantor to his children via trusts, Semafor reported that bankers at the firm had informally advised executives at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which makes Nvidia's most advanced chips, on navigating Washington. Cantor called Semafor's report "baseless and false."
TSMC received billions of dollars in federal subsidies created during the Biden administration and administered by the Commerce Department to fund its U.S. manufacturing expansion.
Democratic senators called for an ethics investigation in December into whether the Lutnick family stood to benefit from his push to expand AI data centers.
And on Wednesday, Sens. Warren and Chris Coons, D-Del., demanded that Howard Lutnick, Rubio and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller preserve records on Nvidia's chip exports to China and intelligence warnings about Huang.
The senators questioned whether "prudent defensive counter-intelligence action was taken or national security recommendations were overruled."
"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 Friday on CNBC's "Squawk Box," accusing the administration of turning a blind eye to the black market for more advanced chips.
