Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s China puts Trump ties under scrutiny

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has spent the past two years cultivating an unparalleled relationship with President Donald Trump, gaining extraordinary access and influence over federal artificial intelligence policy as his company has pushed for looser restrictions on selling advanced chips to China.

Now, revelations about Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy are putting that carefully built alliance under scrutiny — along with the millions of dollars Huang and other Nvidia executives have spent expanding the company’s political influence in Washington.

The chipmaker is nearly inseparable from its co-founder and CEO Huang, who during Trump’s second term has gone from being nearly unknown to the president to being part of a small cadre of executives accompanying him on Air Force One.

Nvidia has committed at least $26 million to Trump’s pet projects, including $25 million toward his White House ballroom and $1 million to his 2025 inaugural fund. The company initially sought to keep its ballroom contribution anonymous, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Its ballroom pledge was tied with Apple’s for the largest disclosed corporate contribution, the Post reported.

Those ties are drawing renewed scrutiny from congressional Democrats, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who pressed Huang in November 2025 about Nvidia’s ballroom donation and White House contacts. Blumenthal re-upped his warning on Thursday, while expected incoming House oversight Chairman Robert Garcia, D-Calif., vowed to investigate corporate corruption when Democrats take control in January.

Trump continued to defend Huang on Sunday, calling him an “honorable guy” and saying he had heard nothing suggesting wrongdoing. The president was briefed about the suspected Chinese intelligence operation in October 2025 but chose not to act, according to The New York Times. Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw a classified memo detailing the concerns this spring, the Times reported.

The president’s defense underscores how Huang has become one of Trump’s most prominent allies in the technology industry, repeatedly praising the president, attending White House events and accompanying him on a trip to China in May. Trump is due to return to China next week for a summit with other world leaders.

Congressional scrutiny on Huang ramped up after the Times reported Oct. 29 that U.S. intelligence determined Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who is an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed, was funneling information to Beijing and had “developed a close relationship” with Jensen Huang. The two Huangs are unrelated.

House Republican committee leaders on Thursday asked Jensen Huang to sit for a closed-door briefing on his ties with Alice Huang, saying recent reports “raise significant national security concerns regarding the PRC’s access to sensitive U.S. technology and information.”

In a statement to his company on Sunday,…