Nvidia’s in Bed With a Chinese Spy—and Trump’s in Bed With Nvidia

On November 8, Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of the AI chip company Nvidia, admitted publicly that he got caught in a Chinese honey trap. Huang had an extramarital affair with Alice Huang (no relation; she’s sometimes identified as Huang Le, her Chinese name). Alice Huang was a top executive at a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed. The United States government believes Alice Huang is a Chinese spy and that Megaspeed illegally diverted to China AI chips purchased from Nvidia. (Megaspeed denies this.) The stock market thinks there’s something to these allegations; as I write, Nvidia is on track to lose nearly half a trillion dollars in market value since its chief executive copped to the affair. (He is unusually difficult to fire.) Huang himself is down more than $17 billion and must now make do on a net worth of $146 billion, and possibly a lot less than that if his wife divorces him.Jensen Huang getting caught in bed with Alice Huang is certainly interesting. But President Donald Trump getting caught (figuratively) in bed with Jensen Huang is much more interesting.Jensen Huang happens to be one of Trump’s closest advisers on tech matters. A Reuters reporter recalls seeing the Nvidia chief’s name pop up on Trump’s cell phone in December 2025. Trump took Huang on his May 2025 trip to the Middle East, on his September 2025 visit to the United Kingdom, and on his May 2026 trip to China. In this last instance Huang accompanied Trump on Air Force One at Trump’s personal request. We know that because Trump announced it on Truth Social, identifying the man as “the Great Jensen Huang.” On Monday Trump told reporters he’d phoned his Nvidia bestie earlier that day and asked, “’Did you have any idea that she was a spy?’ He said, ‘I had no idea that she was a spy,’ and I really believe him.”Twice before Monday, and probably more like three times, Trump was told that Huang’s lover was a suspected Chinese spy. The first time was in October 2025, according to The New York Times. Trump “chose not to do anything with the information,” the Times reported, because he was “wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.” The probable second time Trump got told about Huang’s pecadilloes was in a memo that Secretary of State Marco Rubio drafted last spring, according to The Times. The memo in effect warned: Keep your distance from Jensen Huang. The Times reported that the memo was circulated to “top Trump administration officials.” But it’s impossible to believe Trump was kept out of the loop, because when Huang was initially excluded from the China trip (almost certainly for this reason) Trump objected and reversed that decision. According to a new Times report, Rubio told Trump verbally about Huang’s honey trap as Air Force One was preparing to leave for China. In the Times tally, Trump was told twice. In my (slightly more speculative) tally, Trump was told three times.On Monday, Trump said he didn’t recall being told even once about Huang’s worrisome romantic entanglement. That suggests either that Trump is too senile to remember such things or too stupidly defiant to maintain a prudent distance. I lean toward the second interpretation because Trump is, somehow, still defending the guy. “I believe he’s suffering greatly,” Trump told the reporters. “He built a great company, American company, and I think he’s a very honorable guy. And I feel very confident that he’ll be in good shape.”For Trump, all friendships are transactional. In Huang’s case, the chronology went like this. In April 2025, the Trump White House denied Nvidia’s bid to export H200 chips to China. In July and August 2025, Trump and Huang met. In August 2025, Trump announced he would allow the China sales in exchange for the United States receiving 15 percent of the sales revenue. In December, Trump announced he would allow Nvidia to sell the more powerful H200 chips to China, again giving the United States 15 percent of the cut. Around the same time, Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom project, requesting that the donation be anonymous. Somewhere in there Nvidia also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.Throughout this entire period—indeed, going back to 2024—the United States government suspected Nvidia’s chief Southeast Asia partner, Megaspeed, of diverting chips to China. At the time of Trump’s first export approval, it’s possible Trump hadn’t yet been told that Huang’s mistress was a suspected Chinese spy. But at the time of the second export, we know for a fact that he had been told. He approved the foreign sales anyway. Meanwhile, in August 2025—the same month Trump and Huang met, and also the same month Trump announced the first of two decisions to ease up on Nvidia’s export controls to China—officials at the Department of Commerce who were investigating Metaspeed and Alice Huang received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel, Timothy Teter. In the message, Teter told the Commerce officials that he’d been given permission to contact them by their boss Jeff Kessler, a political appointee (undersecretary for industry and security) who, according to the Times, reports directly to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The Commerce officials politely declined to talk to Teter and forwarded his meddling emails to Kessler, who told them to handle the investigation by the book. But it seems clear Kessler and, in all likelihood, Lutnick, flirted momentarily with disrupting Commerce’s Metaspeed investigation, which eventually moved over to the Department of Justice. (In July 2025 Lutnick said of the Nvidia sales to China: “We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best. The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it.”)It shouldn’t surprise anybody that Trump sees national security as a commodity to auction off to the highest bidder. He’s done it before. In the case of Nvidia, Trump granted export approval conditioned on becoming America’s business partner (plus a patriotic supporter of Trump’s White House ballroom and inauguration). In the earlier case of some advanced AI chips desired by the United Arab Emirates that the Biden administration had placed off limits—including Nvidia H200 chips—Trump granted export approval to an entity that was already his own business partner, the UAE, which purchased a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial and then bought $2 billion in WLF stablecoin to invest in Binance. A mere two weeks passed between the latter deal and the Trump administration’s approval of the AI chips purchase.This is all fodder for incoming Democrats interested in accountability, and maybe even some Republicans. In Nvidia’s case, Trump turned a stubbornly blind eye to his own government’s evidence that Nvidia’s partner Megaspeed diverted chips illegally to China. In the UAE’s case, Trump disregarded his own government’s evidence that the UAE was sharing missile technology with China. In both instances, Trump set a price that had nothing to do with protecting national security. People say that Trump is an inconsistent decisionmaker, and that’s true. But when it comes to corruption, Trump is very consistent. He always wants to wet his beak.