Donald Trump apparently is so aligned with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—who has become the president’s key advisor on AI —that he ignored intelligence indicating that Huang was the target of a “Chinese spy plot,” and did so partly to protect Nvidia’s stock.
The New York Times spoke with people briefed on US intelligence agencies’ surveillance and granted them anonymity to discuss findings drawn from “classified intelligence.” According to sources, about a year ago, Trump was briefed that “Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access” to Huang. That “someone” was Alice Huang, or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen and former top executive at a Singapore cloud company called Megaspeed.
According to sources, the US had already suspected that Alice Huang—who is not related to Jensen Huang—was helping China evade export controls to gain access to high-end Nvidia chips through Megaspeed. But it alarmed investigators to discover that she may possibly have used her role at Megaspeed to gain direct access to Jensen Huang. It’s now believed that she perhaps leveraged that closeness to feed intel to China not only on one of America’s leading AI companies, but also to influence Trump’s thinking on AI. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted last month ahead of Trump’s AI talks with China President Xi Jinping, “the president is completely aligned with Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia.”
At least partly due to fears that US action against the alleged spying could hobble Nvidia chip sales or disrupt the delicate US-China trade truce, Trump “chose not to do anything with the information,” sources said.
