Lawmakers ask White House to preserve Trump-Huang communications
Huang’s heavy influence over the president’s artificial-intelligence agenda is attracting fresh scrutiny following Trump’s decision to stand by the CEO despite multiple affairs, The Wall Street Journal reported. Lawmakers are seeking more information about what Trump knew about the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, the Nvidia business partner suspected of working for Chinese intelligence, as well as about the administration’s failure to stop artificial-intelligence chips from going to China.
More than almost any CEO, Huang helped shape the president’s AI strategy and took part in chip deals and state visits around the world, according to the report. “This entire episode demonstrates the dangers of personalizing policy decisions, especially when it comes to national security,” said Aaron Bartnick, a White House tech policy official during the Biden administration. The White House declined to comment on Trump’s relationship with Huang.
Many tech executives warned last year that a flurry of state laws creating new artificial-intelligence regulations threatened to set the U.S. back in the AI race, but it was Jensen Huang who helped spur President Trump to act, the Journal reported. The account traces that influence to a meeting in the Oval Office late last year, when Huang told a small group that included then-chief of staff Susie Wiles and White House AI adviser David Sacks that Trump needed to act to prevent a burdensome patchwork of state AI rules, according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly afterward, Trump posted on Truth Social and signed an executive order targeting states enacting AI rules.
Trump and Huang first met in January 2025, and the president was taken by Huang’s charisma and his success building the chip designer into the dominant player in its industry, people familiar with the matter said. Trump often referenced Huang’s genius and his role in keeping the U.S. ahead of China in the AI race, and called him at night to consult him on major policy decisions, they said.
Trump frequently overruled administration officials who raised concerns about Huang, the report said, and took no action when top advisers circulated a classified memo this spring laying out worries that the CEO had a close relationship with an alleged Chinese intelligence source. At Huang’s urging, Trump approved several deals to send Nvidia chips to China and other countries posing security concerns and enacted an industry-friendly AI strategy that has helped many of the companies Nvidia does business with. Nvidia in turn agreed to invest $500 billion in the U.S. to help build a domestic chip ecosystem, committed $25 million for the White House ballroom and lauded Trump’s moves to slash red tape.
U.S. intelligence officials tracked Alice Huang and collected information on Chinese businesses and their leaders, learning through that process about their connections to Jensen Huang, people familiar with the matter said. Jensen Huang met with business leaders and officials in China on his visits and associated with many Nvidia customers in Southeast Asia. Intelligence officials haven’t definitively proven Alice Huang is a spy, the people said, but her position at Megaspeed — and Chinese industry’s ties to Beijing’s security state — worried them about the possibility of her sharing Jensen Huang-related information to Chinese spy agencies. Attempts to reach Alice Huang were unsuccessful.
Administration officials are now racing to blame one another for not cracking down on chip deals involving executives like Alice Huang, the report said. Many are targeting Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees export restrictions, while observers and lawmakers question the president’s loyalty to the former CEO.
Top Democrats are pursuing investigations into the Commerce Department’s handling of chip exports and into the relationship between Trump and Huang, asking the White House to preserve all communications between the two. “It is not just an intelligence issue; it’s also a potential corruption issue,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) said earlier this week. “There needs to be a really penetrating, comprehensive investigation of all the possible compromises of our intelligence that may have occurred, but also… that Donald Trump is so high on the head of Nvidia, and now is potentially linked to intelligence compromises.”
Asked on TV personality Stephen A. Smith’s podcast Thursday whether Huang should have stepped down, the president sighed, then said, “Well, the big thing is, ‘Was the woman a spy?’ And I don’t know if that’s been determined yet, but if the woman was a spy, yes.” Trump added, “If the woman was not a spy, perhaps it would be different.” He said he spoke to Huang on Wednesday. “He’s going through hell,” the president said. “What he feels most badly about is his wife and family.”
Huang was noticeably absent when other top tech CEOs stood behind Trump at his second inauguration in January 2025; he hadn’t spent much time in Washington during Trump’s first term and had become an industry titan only over the past few years, after the release of ChatGPT and other popular AI models that ran on Nvidia chips. Later that month he met the president at the White House after Trump’s advisers told him about Nvidia’s importance to the economy.
Trump later questioned how Nvidia could hold such a large share of the chip design market and wondered whether he could break up the company or create more competition, he said at a White House AI event in July 2025. “I found out it’s not that easy in that business,” the president said before asking Jensen to stand up in the front row of Mellon Auditorium surrounded by administration officials.
Trump took Huang to the Middle East in May on the first trip of his second term and eventually agreed to let him send chips directly to China later in the year, then took him to the U.K. in September 2025 as part of a global tour that turned the CEO into the industry’s de facto diplomat. “You’re taking over the world,” Trump told Huang during an event in the U.K. U.S. negotiators used the promise of Nvidia AI chips to help secure a preliminary peace deal last year with Armenia and Azerbaijan, one of several examples of so-called chip diplomacy.
Trump bought millions of dollars worth of Nvidia shares in his personal brokerage accounts since returning to office in 2025, and at least a third of the companies backed by 1789 Capital, a venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, have also secured investments from Nvidia, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of their investment portfolios. A 1789 spokeswoman said the firm has never communicated about an investment with Nvidia, save for Reflection AI, in which the two co-led a funding round, and that Trump Jr. isn’t a member of the firm’s investment committee and doesn’t vote on how it allocates capital. The president doesn’t pick or trade individual stocks and independent financial managers handle his portfolio, a White House spokesperson said.
By the spring, national security adviser Marco Rubio had overseen the drafting of a classified memo detailing concerns that Alice Huang was suspected of being a Chinese spy. After Trump had been briefed verbally on Huang’s ties to Alice Huang and learned the Nvidia CEO wasn’t joining his trip to China, he asked Huang to meet Air Force One in Alaska, U.S. officials said. Rubio briefed the president on the plane before they picked up Jensen Huang, according to people familiar with the matter. The New York Times previously reported on the trip details. In September, Jensen Huang and his wife sat at the head table with other executives at Trump’s state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Huang was on stage at a live taping of the “All-In” podcast in Los Angeles in September when his phone rang; it was Trump, who wanted to talk about how recent hacks and concerns about AI models carrying out cyberattacks were “a hoax.” Before Trump could address the audience, Huang struggled to put him on speakerphone. “The great thing about life is that Jensen can develop the most complex computer chip in the world that nobody can copy for 10 years, but he can’t figure out how to put me on speaker,” Trump said.
In early October, Trump presented Huang with the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor, praising him for putting America at the front of the AI race. At the end of the ceremony, Trump met Huang’s parents, who moved to the U.S. from Taiwan; Huang’s mother has trouble walking, so Trump helped her off the stage. Huang took a photo with his parents while wearing his new medal after what the report described as his last public appearance with Trump, later saying “it’s their American dream.” Exactly a month after the ceremony, Nvidia’s board launched the investigation that helped lead to Huang’s ouster.