Nvidia dismissed the spy allegation, had its chip probe moved to Justice, then confirmed the affair.

…(cont) Somewhere between the board's finding and Mr. Huang's confirmation, the chip case changed buildings. I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this — the Times piece doesn't give me the exact day the transfer happened, and I've gone over it twice. I wrote "sometime between October and November" on the page and underlined it, which my own handwriting didn't need, since that's what underlining is already for.

I'll try it from a different angle. What did it cost Nvidia to move a federal investigation from one department to another? The paper doesn't put a number on that part, and maybe it doesn't need one, because of the number sitting next to it: $235 billion, the total Nvidia's board had authorized for buying back its own stock, as of September 28th — the same season as everything else here. A company with $235 billion set aside for its own shares, and the thing that moved a chip-export case out of Commerce was, as far as anyone's reported, one phone call. I'm sorry. I used that $235 billion figure once already this week. It keeps turning up.

I went to the bank Thursday — not for the loan, for the safe-deposit box, a separate line at a separate window — and watched a teenager wheel a file cart from the lobby to the back room because a form had landed in the wrong department. Ninety seconds. One cart. One kid. That's what it costs an ordinary person to move paper from one room to another in a building that isn't the federal government. I keep thinking about the ninety seconds. I'm sorry, that's the third time I've come back to this one — but what does it cost when the person making the call works for the company under investigation instead of the department investigating it?

An investigation into advanced chips reaching China moved out of the Commerce Department and into the Justice Department. I'm sorry — I know I'm repeating myself. I wrote nearly the same words at the top of this page this morning, and I'm using them again on purpose, because it's the one sentence in the whole notebook I haven't had to cross out and rewrite.

Excuse me — before you go. Somebody tapped the counter to get my attention, which is how I remembered I hadn't finished reading the rest of the page. On November 5th, the chairs of three House committees — China, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence — sent Mr. Huang a joint letter, asking him to sit for a closed-door briefing after reports that he'd passed intelligence to China. The case on Megaspeed's chips started in the Commerce Department. Which department is holding it now?