Despite denial, Trump was briefed on spy concerns related to Nvidia CEO during trip to China: CNN source

Playing null of undefined

Nvidia loses $330B in value amid probe into alleged spy plot involving CEO

Trump says he believes Jensen Huang had no idea woman may have been spy

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed U.S. President Donald Trump on intelligence that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in a relationship with a potential Chinese spy as they traveled to China in May aboard Air Force One, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Trump on Monday publicly denied knowing about the allegations at that time.

But the source said the matter was discussed before Huang joined Trump during a layover in Alaska on the way to Beijing, accompanying him and his top aides for the final leg of the flight along with other business leaders.

The president said during a Monday press conference that he had only recently learned about the questions surrounding Huang and his relationship with Alice Huang, who U.S. intelligence has concluded is a Chinese spy. Trump specifically claimed he wasn’t aware of the concerns when he brought the Nvidia chief to Beijing last spring.

The president said he first learned of the situation “not too long ago” and that the FBI was looking into the matter.

A White House official on Tuesday directed CNN to Trump’s comments on Monday, adding: “These sources have no idea what they’re talking about.”

The New York Times first reported that Trump was told on his trip to China about the intelligence.

During that Monday appearance, Trump repeatedly downplayed revelations that Jensen Huang, a close ally, had an affair with a suspected Chinese spy, insisting that he believed the tech billionaire’s assertion that he knew nothing about the alleged espionage operation.

There’s been growing scrutiny over the influential role that Huang played in advising Trump on AI and his approach to trade with China, even as the U.S. government’s intelligence agencies scrutinized the suspected spy who grew close to Huang in an investigation that played out for months behind the scenes.

“I really believe him,” Trump told reporters during the impromptu White House press conference on Monday. “I think that he’ll be in good shape.”

The extraordinary episode has raised acute concerns about the economic and national security risks posed by the Nvidia chief’s relationship with the suspected Chinese spy.

And it’s likely to deepen Democrats’ concerns over what the White House knew about the conduct of Huang and those around him — and why Trump nevertheless continued to rely heavily on the CEO’s counsel in shaping the nation’s multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence industry.

Senior Trump administration officials met earlier Monday with a group of top lawmakers charged with overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies, during which they discussed the intelligence surrounding Huang’s affair with Alice Huang, an executive at a Singapore-based tech firm who is not related to the Nvidia CEO.

The private meeting with the so-called Gang of Eight was initially meant to focus on the war in Iran. But it came days after Jensen Huang admitted to the affair — and nearly a year after the FBI first raised worries to lawmakers that Alice Huang might be feeding information to China, two people familiar with the matter told CNN (Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Monday that the allegation that Alice Huang was gathering information for Beijing was “purely groundless speculation and an attempt to smear and malign China”).

Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were spotted on Capitol Hill as Trump officials huddled for more than an hour with the Gang of Eight lawmakers charged with overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies.

But lawmakers indicated afterward they still had more questions than answers, with Democrats vowing a slew of investigations into the matter once they take control of Congress in January.

“The export of advanced semiconductors to China or countries where China might access them is a matter of immense national security importance,” Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “We are aggressively pursuing more information to understand what happened and whether the decision-making process to export chips was improperly influenced or compromised.”

Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and built it into one of the world’s most valuable companies, is among a handful of tech billionaires who have played an influential role in shaping Trump’s hands-off regulatory approach to the AI industry.

In September, the CEO helped craft a pledge that he and other major AI executives signed at the White House committing to “self-police” their companies. Huang has also repeatedly pressed Trump for greater freedom to sell advanced AI chips to China, putting himself at the centre of one of the most critical and contentious debates within the administration.

“An amazing man, gotten to know him so well, Jensen Huang,” Trump said last month as he awarded him the National Medal of Science. “The entire world is now running on Nvidia.”

Huang’s cozy relationship with Trump, including regular phone calls and trips to Washington for meetings in the West Wing, has persisted despite long-running suspicions within the government that he could be an unwitting conduit of information to China’s government.

Federal agents first informed some lawmakers roughly a year ago that they suspected Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort,” citing his close relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who represented the data centre company Megaspeed.

The FBI officials noted that Alice Huang suddenly had an unusual level of purchasing power for someone in her position, one of the people familiar said.

Those initial suspicions formed the foundation of a classified memo issued in May warning that Jensen Huang had a close relationship with a woman the U.S. now concluded was a Chinese spy, a U.S. official and another person familiar with the matter said.

The memo was overseen by Rubio and circulated among a small group of senior administration officials before Trump’s trip to China to meet with the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, those sources said. Around the same time, a New York research firm that specializes in betting against publicly traded companies published its own report questioning the “uncomfortably close” relationship between the Nvidia CEO and Alice Huang.

Despite the source familiar saying that Trump was briefed on the spy concerns during that May trip, the president did not take any apparent action to distance himself from Jensen Huang. Huang was not initially among the tech executives and businessmen invited to accompany Trump on the China trip, though it’s unclear whether that decision was tied to the Rubio memo. Trump ultimately insisted that the Nvidia CEO join him.

The president later hailed him as “the Great Jensen Huang” in a social media post insisting that reports he was not invited were incorrect. “I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!”

The revelations have generated far more alarm among federal officials and others in Trump’s orbit, who expressed shock that a suspected Chinese spy could gain such direct access to an executive running perhaps the nation’s most important AI company — and potentially, by extension, decision-making at the government’s highest levels.

“Jaw-dropping,” said one former senior Trump official. “The stakes of that are just so high.”

Two former senior intelligence officials at the FBI also questioned the decision not to provide Huang with a “defensive briefing” that would have informed him that he could be the target of Chinese intelligence.

Some Trump allies, meanwhile, have fretted privately that the question of what the president knew about Huang’s affair, and when, gifted Democrats a potent opportunity to launch damaging investigations — and potentially form the basis for an impeachment effort that many in the president’s orbit have come to see as inevitable after Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Senior Democrats in both the House and Senate are already vowing to launch probes into the matter.

“The more I learn about the insane relationship between the Trump Administration, Chinese spies, and AI billionaires, the more I’m convinced there is nothing this administration does that isn’t corrupt,” Sen. Chris Coons, who is poised to lead the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next year, wrote in a recent post on X. “Congress will investigate and get answers.”

Republicans have also sought information from Nvidia, in a sign of the distress over the prospect of China gaining intelligence that could give it an edge in its intense competition with the U.S. to develop AI technology. A trio of House Republicans last week demanded that Huang sit for a confidential briefing this month.

“To me, the real damage goes beyond the attempted influence or the limited intelligence gathering on Nvidia’s [intellectual property] that inevitably occurred,” said Holden Triplett, who served as director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council in the first Trump administration. “It’s all the small details she was likely able to collect about partners, suppliers, how sanctions work in practice, and potential workarounds.”

Nvidia said it will conduct its own investigation into Huang’s conduct, though it remains unclear whether the company’s board is willing to fire him — and what repercussions that would have for the economy. There is no obvious successor to Huang, who has turned Nvidia into a powerhouse supplier of the chips at the centre of the AI boom.

Huang’s troubles have also generated fears throughout the broader sector among lobbyists and policymakers who worry the episode prompted renewed enthusiasm in Congress for more stringently regulating AI companies, dampening the gains that have driven the broader stock market consistently higher.

Yet despite the implications for national security, the economy and Trump’s own administration, the president insisted on Monday that none of it much worried him.

“I’d certainly check with the intelligence people,” he said of when he was first made aware of the concerns tied to Huang. “They could have been mentioned. Certainly, it didn’t make much of an impact on me.”

Adam Cancryn, Kristen Holmes, Zachary Cohen, Kevin Liptak, CNN