Trump had urged Nvidia’s Jensen Huang to fight for his job

• Trump called Nvidia chief Jensen Huang on Nov 10 and urged him to fight to keep his job, even as spy scandal claims grew.
• Huang, a key AI adviser to Trump, was later replaced as CEO after reports of an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy, with and another with an employee.
• Trump backed Huang because he saw Nvidia as vital to AI growth, the economy and markets, and supported wider chip sales to China despite security warnings.

NEW YORK – US President Donald Trump called Jensen Huang on Nov 10, before the Nvidia chief stepped down amid a rapidly unfolding spy scandal, and urged him to keep fighting for his job, according to two people briefed on the conversation.

The call was the latest instance of Trump defending and protecting Huang, who had become a high-profile ally and an influential adviser on artificial intelligence. The President continued to back him to the end, even after US intelligence agencies had concluded that Huang was having an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy.

Nvidia announced on Nov 12 that Huang, who built the company into the world’s leading supplier of advanced AI chips, had been replaced as CEO following revelations not just of the affair with the woman suspected of being a spy, but also another with one of his employees.

A representative for Huang did not provide a comment for this article. Neither Trump nor the White House responded to requests for comment about his call to Huang.

The President had been warned at least twice about Huang’s relationship with a Chinese citizen known as Alice Huang, whom intelligence agencies concluded had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security, The New York Times has reported. The first warning was in late 2025, and the second was in the spring.

Trump took no action either time, and brought Huang with him on a trip to China in May. In recent days, he has publicly praised Jensen Huang and expressed sympathy for him, saying in a social media post on Nov 12 that he was a “legend”.

The President’s advisers said he was blasé about the national security implications when told of the intelligence community assessments related to Huang. One aide said that Trump saw the episode mainly through the lens of adultery, and that the President dismissed the idea of Huang’s entanglement posing a threat to the country.

Trump saw Nvidia as essentially too big to fail, aides said. The company, one of the world’s largest by market capitalisation, has played a vital role in the global economy and underpinned the president’s hopes for AI dominance over China.

Advisers to Trump gave several explanations for the way he had handled the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations.

Chief among them was that the President had invested greatly in Huang, whom he saw as a modern-day Henry Ford, leading in a technology that could define the century.

Trump viewed Nvidia’s fortunes as bound up with those of the US economy and the stock market. When reports surfaced that the company’s board was considering removing Huang, Trump asked confidants what they thought would happen to the markets. He was worried that Huang’s ouster could cause a sharp downturn.

The President’s last-ditch effort to save Huang was a remarkable moment in a relationship that barely existed two years ago.

During Trump’s first term, Huang was nowhere on his radar. The Nvidia founder had no real presence in Washington. He did not lobby or give to campaigns, and showed little interest in politics.

The Biden administration’s sweeping restrictions on chip exports forced Huang to be more attentive to Washington, but he still did far less politicking than his rivals. In contrast to other tech leaders, he did not attend Trump’s second inauguration.

With evident relish, Trump has told the story of first hearing Huang’s name. “Who the hell is he? What’s his name?” he has recalled to associates. “His name is Jensen Huang of Nvidia. I said, ‘What the hell is Nvidia?’”

By late 2024, Trump had learnt that Huang was the indispensable man at the company that controlled at least 80% of the market for chips used to train the most advanced AI models. And Huang saw an opening to woo a president who demanded personal attention and responded to flattery.

In April 2025, Huang and his wife, Lori, attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and a group of tech and crypto donors. The president came away intrigued, and the more he learnt, the more impressed he became. He was told again and again that the AI boom ran almost entirely through Nvidia. “You’re taking over the world, Jensen,” Trump would later tell him.

Huang offered something the President had failed to get in his first term and hoped to achieve in his second. During his first administration, Trump had pledged to bring back coal and steel jobs. But those industries never returned to their old strength.

AI offered a route to the reindustrialisation of the United States that Trump had promised voters. He came to believe that the rush to build data centres and their enormous appetite for electricity could produce a manufacturing revival and keep an otherwise shaky economy running hot. To the President, that made the leaders of the AI companies the most valuable executives in the country, and Huang perhaps the most valuable of them all.

Huang played into that saviour role. In 2025, he said Nvidia would produce up to US$500 billion (S$643 billion) worth of AI infrastructure in the United States. He also praised the President lavishly.

“America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump,” he said in July. He travelled with Trump to the Persian Gulf in May 2025, where the President announced deals for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to buy Nvidia chips. He provided the kind of deal-making headlines that Trump craved.

Huang had persuaded Trump that Nvidia should sell its chips as widely as possible, so that the world would build on US, rather than Chinese, technology. David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto czar, backed him. The two men helped persuade Trump to plant himself on the unpopular side of a major issue for the populist right.

China hawks on the MAGA right, including Steve Bannon, wanted chip sales to China banned outright. But Trump sided with Huang and his billionaire counterparts leading other tech companies, including OpenAI, Meta and SpaceX.

At Huang’s urging, Trump allowed Nvidia to sell certain models of its chips to China under an unusual arrangement in which the federal government took 15%, and later 25%, of the revenue. Critics raised legal questions and warned that national security was being sold out. Administration officials privately marvelled at how much sway Huang seemed to have with the president.

Some US officials had worried about Huang long before the spy scandal broke into the open this fall. They saw him as, at best, naive and careless in his dealings with Chinese executives and local officials, with whom he kept close ties. Some wondered how he could possibly have been oblivious to Alice Huang’s possible connections to Chinese intelligence.

But Trump was never likely to share in those national security concerns. While he has used bellicose campaign rhetoric against China – he has accused Beijing of “raping” the American economy and made that line of attack a focus of his 2016 presidential campaign – he has never been a China hawk in any conventional sense. NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.