Trump says the US will look 'very closely' at report China targeted Nvidia's Jensen Huang

The skim

• President Trump said Saturday the US will "check it out very closely" after The New York Times reported that intelligence officials believe a Chinese executive close to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was passing information to Beijing.
• He praised Huang as "brilliant" and said he'd like to keep him as an adviser "unless we find out something to the contrary," but called it "a very complex issue."
• China calls the report "groundless speculation," Nvidia says the contacts were routine customer meetings, and Singapore says it never investigated the executive's alleged spy ties.

What happened

Asked about the report at his Florida residence on Saturday, Trump offered support for Nvidia's chief executive without fully closing the door. "I have a lot of respect for Jensen. I didn't know about the specific thing, but I hope he's going to be OK. He's a great, brilliant person, and we want to protect our brilliant people," he said, according to AFP. "We're going to check it out very closely."

Asked whether Huang would stay on as an adviser, Trump said: "I would like to say yes. I mean, unless we find out something to the contrary, I've always found Jensen Huang to be very above board." He added: "But you know, you're dealing in a very complex issue." The Washington Post described the remarks as stopping short of fully backing one of his most influential tech advisers.

What the report says

The Times reported on Oct. 29, citing people briefed on classified intelligence, that US agencies had concluded Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese businesswoman linked to Singapore data center firm Megaspeed, was gathering information for Beijing and had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang. She is not related to him. According to the Times, as summarized by TechCrunch and the BBC, surveillance revealed her communications with an American citizen who was later identified, through a process known as "unmasking," as Jensen Huang. Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer, has separately been investigated by US authorities over whether it helped Chinese companies get around export rules on advanced AI chips.

Ars Technica, summarizing the Times, reports that sources said Trump was briefed about a year ago and chose not to act on the information. It's unclear what, if anything, Alice Huang passed to Beijing. She did not respond to the Times, according to the BBC.

The pushback

Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said "Jensen's interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected," and that customers like Megaspeed "receive ordinary business information - not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets - and zero information relevant to national security," the BBC reports. Huang himself told Bloomberg that Nvidia's business with Megaspeed was "normal and not unusual," and said of Megaspeed's hardware, "We've studied all their deployments of our GPUs and counted every one," CNA reports.

China's foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun called the story "groundless speculation" and "an attempt to smear China." Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said Saturday that the government had not investigated Alice Huang over alleged ties to Chinese intelligence or her relationship with Huang, though police say their probe into Megaspeed itself is ongoing. Megaspeed told the Times it had hired outside legal advisers for an internal investigation and was willing to cooperate with the US government.

Why it matters

Huang runs the dominant maker of AI chips and has been one of the loudest voices in Washington for letting Nvidia sell more of them to China. The administration has loosened some of those export restrictions. A report that Beijing had a source close to him lands right in the middle of that policy fight, and Nvidia's China sales depend on Washington's export rules.

What's next

Trump didn't say who would look into the matter or when. The things to watch: whether Huang keeps his role as an adviser, and where the US and Singapore investigations into Megaspeed land.

Sources: AFP, The Washington Post, The New York Times, TechCrunch, BBC, CNA and Ars Technica.