Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
- Huawei’s US research arm was embedded at Nvidia’s HQ in California for years.
- US lawmakers want to know what it was doing there and asked it to turn over internal documents.
- Huawei has been blacklisted since 2019, barred from US chips and suppliers on security grounds.
US lawmakers are asking for information about Huawei’s US research arm, which they say shared a campus with Nvidia’s Santa Clara, California headquarters.
In a letter sent to Huawei affiliate Futurewei on Sunday, the chairman and a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said that the Chinese telecommunications giant’s US arm was located inside Nvidia’s campus for a decade. Futurewei held the prime lease on three buildings at 2330 Central Expressway, while Nvidia subleased space. That setup lasted until 2024, when Nvidia bought out the lease and took full control of the site.
The lawmakers said the arrangement was “deeply concerning” and asked Futurewei to turn over internal documents.
“This co-location provided Futurewei unprecedented access to America’s most advanced semiconductor and AI capabilities,” wrote Republican Chairman John Moolenaar and Democratic Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi of the House Select Committee on China.
The US has blacklisted Huawei since 2019, cutting it off from advanced chips and restricting American firms from supplying the company due to national security concerns.
The committee referenced a 2018 lawsuit accusing Huawei of using Futurewei as a corporate spy tool. The case was filed in California by Jesse Hong, a former Futurewei employee who accused Huawei of “engagement in enterprise espionage.” The lawsuit said Hong was laid off in retaliation for whistleblowing.
According to the lawsuit, Futurewei directed employees to sneak into a closed-door Facebook telecommunications summit using “fake US company names” after Huawei was barred from attending. Futurewei then funneled reports back to executives in China.
The lawsuit also said Futurewei used “consulting work” with US startups to obtain confidential information. Hong’s lawsuit was settled in 2019.
“If Futurewei was used to infiltrate closed-door industry meetings and extract sensitive data through both deception and proximity, then its decade-long embedded presence within NVIDIA’s campus — at the center of US semiconductor and AI development — cannot be immediately dismissed as incidental,” the lawmakers wrote.
Futurewei has since moved to San Jose, “just a ten-minute drive down the road,” the letter said. But the company’s continued presence in the heart of Silicon Valley “underscores unresolved concerns about how it may still be operating,” it added.
Nvidia, Futurewei, Huawei, and the House panel did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
An Nvidia spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company makes sure its “offices, employees, and intellectual property are safe and secure. Even where we have neighbors, we maintain a separate Nvidia-only campus.”
The chips war
Huawei has been at the center of Washington’s crackdown on Chinese tech for years.
In 2019, the Trump administration blacklisted the telecom giant, cutting it off from US suppliers and banning access to advanced chips made with American technology. Those restrictions did not abate under President Joe Biden. In June 2021, Biden signed an executive order expanding the number of Chinese companies Americans are prohibited from investing in. Huawei was on the list.
But those efforts appear to have only strengthened Huawei’s push toward self-sufficiency. The company has been using locally produced chips in its flagship smartphone line, the Huawei Mate, since 2023.
Even Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, has been impressed. In March, Huang said Huawei’s “presence in AI is growing every single year,” telling the Financial Times that the US government’s efforts to stifle the company had been “done poorly.”
It’s not just Huawei eyeing US chips. Business Insider reported last month that China’s military has been trying to source Nvidia hardware for everything from servers running DeepSeek’s AI models to 33-pound “robot dogs” with high-definition cameras.
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