U.S. intelligence agencies had warned President Donald Trump at least twice about Nvidia chief Jensen Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen they believed had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security. The first warning came late last year, the second in the spring. Trump took no action and brought Huang on a trip to China in May.¹

By then, Huang had become a close ally. Trump’s advisers saw Nvidia as crucial to the U.S. economy and the president’s ambition to outpace China in artificial intelligence. They said Trump largely treated the scandal as a personal matter, not a national security threat, and worried that removing Huang could shake markets. Huang had also urged Trump to allow Nvidia to sell chips more widely, arguing that global technology should be built on U.S. systems; China hawks, including Steve Bannon, wanted a complete ban on chip sales.²

On Tuesday, as the scandal intensified, Trump called Huang and urged him to keep fighting for his CEO job, according to people briefed on the conversation. The president continued to back him despite the intelligence assessment, and later called Huang a “legend” in a social media post.¹

That support did not prevent Huang’s departure. Nvidia announced on Thursday that he had been replaced as CEO after revelations of affairs with both the woman suspected of being a spy and a company employee.¹

The episode exposed a divide in Trump’s approach: advisers saw Nvidia’s economic weight and AI ambitions as reasons to protect its leader, while intelligence concerns and hard-line warnings about China’s access to chips pointed in the opposite direction.²