Many officials who raised chip strategy concerns were sidelined or left the administration
For nearly two years, Jensen Huang enjoyed direct access to President Trump and vast influence over American AI policy. Warnings from officials inside the administration that his lobbying undercut U.S. national security made little impact during that stretch, The Wall Street Journal reported, as the Nvidia chief executive won a steady loosening of the rules governing his company’s chip sales to China.
The Journal’s account, published Wednesday, lands as Nvidia’s board prepares to remove Huang as CEO following revelations of an affair with a suspected Chinese intelligence source — a step the newspaper said would mark “a stunning downfall for one of the world’s most powerful tech executives.” The Justice Department is leading multiple investigations into the matter, and some lawmakers are calling on Congress to investigate as well.
The woman at the center of the affair, Alice Huang, is a top executive at Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer, and is suspected by U.S. officials of being a Chinese intelligence source — a designation Beijing has denied. Details of the affair were known to top officials including Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe going back to last year and were also brought to Trump’s attention, people familiar with the matter said. The administration took no action to blacklist Megaspeed or curb the Nvidia chief’s influence. Trump said earlier this week he had spoken with Huang, who told him he had no idea Alice Huang was a spy.
The national-security concerns long predated the affair’s emergence. From the outset of Trump’s second term, some administration officials were deeply uncomfortable with Huang’s posture toward China. To some Trump advisers, Huang was advocating a brazen approach toward China that undercut national security, people familiar with the matter said. After Huang left his first White House meeting of the new term, a group of advisers huddled to discuss his push to allow Nvidia to sell more chips to China; one quipped that Huang would sell chips directly to China’s People’s Liberation Army if the government let him, according to people familiar with the comments.
The unease tracked a monthslong lobbying campaign that began even before Inauguration Day, a stretch during which Huang developed a close relationship with the then president-elect. Before Trump’s return to office, a bipartisan consensus had favored keeping Nvidia’s high-end chips from fueling China’s AI boom. Huang moved swiftly to convince Trump and his team that keeping China and other countries hooked on U.S. chips mattered more, the Journal reported. Nvidia stood to reap potentially huge rewards with more access to the Chinese market, and Huang’s aggressive lobbying led some U.S. officials to question his motivations — many of those officials likely unaware at the time of the affair.
The warnings changed little. Huang retained a direct line of communication to Trump, and allies in the administration — White House AI adviser David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — helped elevate his profile with the president and counter his critics, the Journal reported. Many of the officials who raised concerns about chip strategy in the National Security Council, the State Department and the Commerce Department unit overseeing export controls were either effectively sidelined or left the administration.
Some aides working on trade and national-security issues for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Rubio and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer held private conversations with think-tank researchers who specialize in scrutinizing China and companies doing business with Beijing, seeking further insight into Huang’s relationship with China, according to people familiar with the matter. That information would at times be shared with the White House, others explained.
“These are multinational companies that have allegiances to their shareholders, not an individual country. We can’t look at them as stewards of national security,” said Joel Thayer, senior adviser for AI at the conservative America First Policy Institute, who has opposed sending chips to China.
Huang had burst onto the Washington scene in the final years of the Biden administration, which had begun taking steps to curtail chip exports to adversarial nations and was particularly worried about loopholes in export rules that could benefit China — an approach Huang and Nvidia called overzealous and restrictive. The Biden administration launched investigations into companies, including Alice Huang’s, for diverting U.S. chips to China.
Trump’s victory in 2024 gave Huang a chance to reset the export-control conversation in Nvidia’s favor. After Trump fired several members of the National Security Council in April 2025, Huang faced less opposition in the administration. That month, Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, attended a $1 million-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump reversed a recently announced ban on shipping an Nvidia chip directly to China. In May 2025, Huang called U.S. export-control policy “a failure” and accompanied Trump on the first international trip of the new term, to the Middle East, where new chip deals were announced with Gulf nations including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Huang headed to Beijing in July 2025 with a major win in hand: after a meeting with Trump, Nvidia could soon resume deliveries of its H20 chip for Chinese customers, reversing a policy Huang had decried as a mistake. He met with Chinese officials and signed autographs outside a hotel, saying Nvidia was doing its best to serve China’s semiconductor market. A week later, he was back in Washington, giving the president a standing ovation from the front row at a summit where Trump unveiled the administration’s AI strategy. Chinese negotiators saw Trump’s decision as a gesture of good faith in trade talks; some officials in the administration were aghast, and those wary of China viewed the decision to give Nvidia what it wanted as dangerous, people familiar with the matter said.
When the White House was preparing for Trump’s state visit to China last May, Huang was notably absent from the list of chief executives invited to attend. The trip came soon after Rubio had overseen the drafting of a memo that included concerns that Alice Huang might be a Chinese intelligence asset, U.S. officials said. Following media reports that Huang wasn’t invited, Trump invited him to meet Air Force One in Alaska and fly with him the rest of the way to Beijing. In September, Huang and his wife were seated at the head table of a state dinner for China’s Xi Jinping, alongside other tech executives.
Sacks, a venture capitalist who co-hosts the “All-In” podcast, shared a preference for minimal Washington intervention in the booming AI industry, and some administration officials noticed that his arguments in favor of chip exports were often almost identical to those they had heard from Huang, some of the people said. Lutnick helped complete all of the export agreements and forged a close relationship with Huang, frustrating security officials in the State Department and other agencies who disagreed with Huang’s arguments, some of the people said. Spokespeople from the State and Commerce departments didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In one rare example of security concerns overriding Huang’s arguments, Rubio and other top advisers convinced Trump not to allow the export to China of a much more powerful Nvidia chip, the Blackwell, which Huang had begun pushing for in the weeks leading up to a summit between Trump and Xi in South Korea in October 2025. That same month, Nvidia donated $25 million to the president’s ballroom project. By that time, the New York Times had already published an article outlining concerns that Megaspeed was diverting Nvidia chips to China. Later in the year, Huang did convince Trump to allow Nvidia to send China the H200, a chip with capabilities between the H20 and the Blackwell, in exchange for a 25% cut of the sales for the U.S. government.
Lawmakers are now pressing for answers. “We need to know why the Commerce Department was allowing Nvidia to sell advanced chips to the company of the woman he was having an affair with,” Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) said Wednesday, calling on Lutnick to address the matter and Congress to investigate it. Rep. Brian Mast (R., Fla.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, told the Journal he may subpoena Huang to brief lawmakers next week. Mast said administration officials have frequently raised concerns with Congress around China’s access to Nvidia chips.
Nvidia didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has said it halted shipments to Megaspeed in the summer of 2025 and works with U.S. authorities to ensure there isn’t large-scale chip diversion to China.