On the menu today: There are regimes in this world that hate the United States, and they are playing for keeps. They will pull out every dirty trick and underhanded move to undermine us, and a big, valuable target is our tech industry, particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence and advanced chips. Back in December, the editors of NR lamented, “The famous line often attributed to Vladimir Lenin is that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope that would later be used to hang them. In this case, the U.S. government is apparently thrilled to get 25 percent of the sales of the chips that China might use to beat us in the AI race.” Those chips are made by Nvidia.
Well, it turns out the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, had a “close relationship” with a Chinese intelligence asset. How’s that decision to sell China advanced chips looking now?
Where the Chips Are Falling
If this morning’s New York Times reporting is accurate, that headline is not merely a metaphor:
American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence.
A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.
But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.
For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House.
Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.
Nvidia designs, develops, and manufactures graphic processing units, and with the AI boom, last year the company became the first in history to surpass $5 trillion in market capitalization. The company has been described as “the backbone of the global AI industry” and co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is, if not the most important person in the field of artificial intelligence, probably in the top five or six. (Because this story involves multiple people with the surname Huang, I will be referring to them by both their first and last names.) For years, Jensen Huang has contended that his company could sell its less-than-most-advanced semiconductor chips to China with no additional risk to U.S. national security.
In December, President Trump announced that his administration would allow Nvidia to sell its second-most-powerful chip to China in exchange for the government taking a quarter of the proceeds. At the time, more than a few people doubted the wisdom of that move, or whether a cut of the profits justified the potential risk to American national security.
In fact, a whole bunch of Republicans who are usually allies of the president questioned the move. “The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] will use these highly advanced chips to strengthen its military capabilities and totalitarian surveillance,” said Michigan Republican Representative John Moolenaar, chair of the House’s Select Committee on China. “Finally, Nvidia should be under no illusions — China will rip off its technology, mass produce it themselves, and seek to end Nvidia as a competitor. That is China’s playbook and it is using it in every critical industry.”
Matt Pottinger, who served as a senior White House Asia adviser during Trump’s first term, told a congressional hearing that the administration is on the “wrong track” on AI and that its decision to allow the chip sales will damage its goal of winning the AI race.”
Selling H200s to China “will supercharge Beijing’s military modernization, enhancing capabilities in everything from nuclear weapons to cyber warfare, autonomous drones, biological warfare and intelligence and influence operations,” he said. “Congress needs to put guardrails in place so that this mistake can’t be repeated,” he added.
Senator Dave McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican, said at the Aspen Security Forum:
“I’m concerned. I’m not clear on why that is the right path for us. . . . The argument is that this will somehow slow China’s capacity to develop its own capability, by giving them the most advanced chips. I don’t think that’s been the experience. I think you can count on China to be doing everything in its power to develop its own capacity and that America’s position should be in in my opinion doing everything we can to maintain elite. So, it appears to me that by exporting those chips it’s not — let me say it this way it’s not clear to me how that would in any way slow their advances and it seems more likely that it would accelerate them.”
The late Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNBC, “Alarm bells go off in my head here.” Even Missouri GOP Senator Josh Hawley, usually a stalwart supporter of the president, said, “My general view on this is that China’s progress on AI is almost entirely parasitic on our technology, in particular on our hardware. So, I don’t want China to win the AI race. I want to win the AI race. But if we want to beat China, I think we need to constrain their ability to leverage our own technology, and I think we would want to reduce their access to our hardware, not increase it.”
Bizarrely, President Trump spoke about the deal as if he had to persuade Xi Jinping to accept the chips. “I have informed President Xi, of China, that the United States will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China, and other Countries, under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security. President Xi responded positively!”
Note that Nvidia had record revenue of $215 billion in fiscal 2026. They are a spectacularly profitable company. They cannot possibly need the money from selling H200 chips to China. In the company’s August earnings report, they said that “sales of H200s to Chinese buyers made up less than one percent of the chipmaker’s data center revenue for the three months ended July 26.” This isn’t a money thing. Someone in a very powerful position believes that it is important for Chinese firms — and remember, there is no such thing as an independent company in China — to have access to the second-most advanced chips that Nvidia makes.
When the president makes a decision that doesn’t make sense to anyone, we should be looking for what is really going on behind the scenes.
No doubt, President Trump holds Jensen Huang in the highest esteem. In a July 2025 event, President Trump mentioned that until he returned to the presidency earlier that year, he had never heard of Nvidia or Huang:
I said, look, we’ll break this guy up. This is before I learned the facts of life. I said we’ll break him up. They said no, sir, it’s very hard. I said why? I said what percentages of the market does he have? Sir, he has 100 percent. I said who the hell is he? What’s his name? His name is Jensen Huang, NVIDIA. I said what the hell is NVIDIA? I’ve never heard of it before. [Laughter] He said you don’t want to know about it, sir. [Laughter] I figured we could go in and we could sort of break him up a little bit, get him a little competition. And I found out it’s not easy in that business. I said supposing we put the greatest minds together and they work hand in hand for a couple of years? He said no, it would take at least ten years to catch him if he ran NVIDIA totally incompetently from now on. So I said all right, let’s go on to the next one. [Laughter] And then I got to know Jensen, and now I see why. Jensen, will you stand up? What a job, what a job you’ve done. Man! Great. It’s a great — he’s a great guy too.
We should note that the Times article describes the relationship between Alice Huang and Jensen Huang as “close,” but does not specify it is romantic or sexual. But judging from the available photos of Alice Huang, sitting close to Jensen Huang, in a Taipei restaurant . . . she’s not exactly hard on the eyes.
There’s reason to conclude that the Times has been digging into the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang for a while now. Here’s an article in that newspaper from October 2025:
On a humid June night last year, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, held court with several of his company’s major Asian customers at a bar with sweeping views of Taipei. . . .
Next to the Nvidia chief was a woman named Huang Le, or Alice Huang, an executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed, which was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia A.I. technology over the next year.
Though Ms. Huang and Megaspeed are little-known players in the A.I. industry, their association with Nvidia and its chief executive has recently become a preoccupation in Washington. . . .
It is not clear when Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang, who are not related, first met. She was mingling with a crowd of tech executives just after midnight at the Taipei bar in early June of last year when she offered to ask Mr. Huang of Nvidia to join them, recalled Parker Schmitt, an executive who was with the group.
“She said, ‘I bet you guys I can get Jensen here,’ and then Jensen immediately showed up,” Mr. Schmitt said, referring to Mr. Huang by his first name. Photos posted to LinkedIn by NetThunder, a data software provider where Mr. Schmitt is chief executive, show Mr. Huang at the bar with the group.
Note that article was published about a month or two before Trump made his decision to approve the sale of H200 chips to China, and right around the time Trump was informed that Huang had a close relationship with an agent of Chinese intelligence. And the president approved the chip sales anyway, baffling his usual allies and unnerving China hawks.
This morning’s Times article notes, “It is also not clear under what circumstances Ms. Huang began gathering information for Beijing, what information she passed along or its value to China.”
Many fans of the president enjoy mocking former California Representative Eric Swalwell for his sexual relationship with Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese operative at the center of a yearslong counterintelligence investigation, and Swalwell deserves all the grief he gets for that. Even if Swalwell never revealed any classified or sensitive information during his pillow talk, the now-even-further-disgraced representative demonstrated egregious judgment by putting himself in that situation.
But here we have a much more consequential “close relationship” between a powerful figure in the United States and a female Chinese intelligence asset, one that raises serious questions about whether the U.S. president should be taking the advice from the Nvidia CEO — or, for that matter, why the president did nothing when given this information.
But I suspect this development will get little attention or discussion in MAGA-world.
ADDENDUM: Our Dan McLaughlin looks at the various races for governor and concludes, “Given historic polling trends, it remains possible that Vivek Ramaswamy’s voters are being undercounted, but otherwise, the races in Ohio, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Maine, and Arizona look effectively over, to say nothing of Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, and Alaska.”