Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked major automakers, including Tesla, General Motors and Ford, to provide details about their Chinese supply chains after a study found links between some car companies and Chinese entities in a region where U.S. officials say forced labor exists.
Wyden sent letters to eight automakers, asking how they map their supply chains to determine if any part is linked to the region where the Uyghur minority group has allegedly been abused. Wyden referenced the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law last year and took effect in June. The bill says imports from China’s Xinjiang region should not be allowed into the country unless the importer can convincingly show the products weren’t made with forced labor.
Wyden told the companies the information he requested “will aid the Senate Finance Committee’s investigation of the effectiveness of trade-based efforts by the United States to combat forced labor and other serious human rights abuses in China.”
In a fact sheet published last year, the U.S. State Department wrote that the Chinese government has used surveillance technologies and criminal charges to help it “abduct and detain” over one million Muslims, including Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. The agency said there are up to 1,200 “state-run internment camps” in Xinjiang where forced labor is being used.
A representative from the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but China has previously denied the use of forced labor, despite findings to the contrary by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary slavery.
In the letters, Wyden referenced a report this month from the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University that found links between Chinese companies operating in the Xinjiang region and automakers that use their products.
The senator asked Tesla, GM, Ford, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Toyota and Volkswagen how they track the supply chains of parts manufacturing in other countries like Mexico or Canada to determine if there are any links back to Xinjiang.
Wyden also asked the automakers if they have plans to exit the Xinjiang region and whether they have ever cut off or threatened to cut off a relationship with a supplier or sub-supplier over its links to the region. He requested additional information about any shipments to the automakers that were seized by border authorities.
GM said after the report that it monitors its global supply chain and performs due diligence, “particularly where we identify or are made aware of potential violations of the law, our agreements, or our policies.” The carmaker said it uses its supplier code of conduct, guided by the U.N. Global Compact, to “investigate issues, substantiate claims, establish the facts and act rapidly to determine the appropriate solution on a case-by-case basis, up to and including the termination of business relationships.”
GM also said it has a “robust” supplier code of conduct and terms and conditions that “clearly state our prohibition against any use of child labor or any other form of forced or involuntary labor, abusive treatment of employees or corrupt business practices in the supplying of goods and services to GM.”
A spokesperson for Stellantis said the company “take these matters extremely seriously,” and is reviewing Wyden’s letter and the study he referenced.
“Building strong responsible supply chains is an important focus for us,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We monitor our suppliers’ compliance with our Code of Conduct and respect for human rights by requiring contractual commitments and ongoing evaluation.”
A Honda spokesperson said in a statement that the company “expects our suppliers to follow our Global Sustainability Guidelines with respect to labor,” and that the company “will work with policymakers on these important issues.”
A spokesperson for Toyota declined to comment, noting the company just received the letter. Other automakers named in this article did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“I recognize automobiles contain numerous parts sourced across the world and are subject to complex supply chains,” Wyden wrote. “However, this recognition cannot cause the United States to compromise its fundamental commitment to upholding human rights and U.S. law.”
Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022.
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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.
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NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote, part of the 9th edition of the VivaTech technology startup and innovation fair, held at the Dôme de Paris in the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold another 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale comes as part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Huang began trading stock last month. His most recent sale, disclosed last Friday, totaled 225,000 shares, or about $36 million.
Since he began selling stock this year, Huang has unloaded 1.2 million shares, totaling about $190 million, according to InsiderScore. In last year’s prearranged plan, Huang cashed in over $700 million.
AI demand and the need for graphics processing units powering large language models have spiked Huang’s net worth and propelled Nvidia past a $4 trillion market capitalization, making it the most valuable company.
That surge in value has put Huang above Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in net worth on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
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In another significant win, Nvidia said this week that it plans to soon restart sales of its H20 chips to China after the Trump administration indicated that it would approve export licenses.
Earlier this year, the administration said Nvidia would need a license approval to ship the chips, designed specifically for China.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
Huang said during a press conference on Wednesday in Beijing, China, that he wants to sell chips more advanced than the H20 to China at some point.
Huang wasn’t the only stakeholder to unload Nvidia shares. Board member Brooke Seawell sold $16 million worth of stock.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks to members of the media in Beijing, China, on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
Na Bian | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia is looking to ship more advanced chips to China than its current generation, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, as he looks to revitalize sales in the world’s second-largest economy.
The comments come after Nvidia said on Monday that it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, reversing a previous ban. The H20 is a less-advanced semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said during a press conference in Beijing, China, in response to a CNBC question.
“And the reason for that is because technology is always moving on … today Hopper’s terrific but some years from now we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it’s sensible that whatever we’re allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said referencing Hopper, Nvidia’s chip architecture that the H20 is built on.
Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.
Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.
Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.
The Nvidia boss has argued the Chinese AI market could be worth $50 billion in the next two-to-three years and that it would be a “tremendous loss” for American firms not to be part of that. Huang also told CNBC this year that Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei has “got China covered” if U.S. firms can’t participate in the market.
“Export control are things that are outside of our control and they can be quite disruptive to our business. It is our job only to inform the governments of the nature and the unintended consequences of the policies that they make,” Huang said during his visit to Beijing.
Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap to release more advanced chips, though it remains unclear if the U.S. government would allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested on Tuesday that the government would continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market rely on American technology.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick told CNBC. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”