Rubio
Warned Officials About Nvidia Chief’s Entanglement With Chinese Spy
The
secretary of state’s role in drafting a secret memo highlights how top
officials were concerned by this past spring about Jensen Huang’s relationship
with a woman tied to Chinese intelligence.
A memo
circulated this past spring warning top Trump administration officials that
Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, was in a close relationship with a
Chinese spy.Credit...Lisi Niesner/Reuters
By Maggie HabermanJonathan SwanJulian E. Barnes and Tripp Mickle
The
reporters have been covering China’s spying on Nvidia and America’s artificial
intelligence industry.
Nov. 8,
2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/08/us/politics/rubio-nvidia-ceo-chinese-spy.html
Secretary
of State Marco Rubio oversaw the drafting of the
highly classified memo this past spring warning top Trump administration
officials that Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, was in a close
relationship with a Chinese spy, multiple people briefed on the matter said.
The
document was based on classified intelligence from electronic surveillance of
Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who was a senior executive at a Singapore-based
company that was buying Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips and
being investigated for illegally smuggling them into China. U.S. officials had
concluded that Ms. Huang was in a close relationship with the Nvidia chief, who
is no relation, and that she had been recruited to spy by China’s top
intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security.
Mr.
Rubio’s involvement in warning administration officials about the situation has
not been previously reported. It highlights how concerns about the relationship
and the spying were known to senior officials even as Mr. Huang, a pivotal
figure in the explosive growth of A.I., remained an influential voice with Mr.
Trump over policy on the issue.
Mr. Huang
has opposed calls for more tightly regulating the export of the most advanced
A.I. chips and has pushed to be able to sell all but the most recently
developed technology to China, the main competitor to the United States in the
global rush for A.I. supremacy.
On
Sunday, Nvidia said it was opening
an investigation into Mr. Huang after he acknowledged that he had been
intimate with Ms. Huang, though the company said it had “no reason to believe
that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised.”
In a
message to the company, Mr. Huang apologized.
“I was
unfaithful to my wife,” he said. “My actions hurt her and our children. There
is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”
A State
Department spokesman and a White House spokeswoman declined to comment.
Mr.
Rubio’s memo was circulated to administration officials with high-level
security clearances ahead of a trip Mr. Trump took to China in May, the people
briefed on the matter said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss
sensitive material.
Despite
his status as an A.I. pioneer and head of one of the world’s most valuable
companies, Mr. Huang was initially left off the list of major business and tech
executives invited to join Mr. Trump in China. It is unclear whether the
exclusion was connected to the memo. By that point, a number of people inside
the administration were concerned about Mr. Huang’s influence on the
president’s policy of only lightly regulating A.I., people briefed on the
matter said.
After Mr.
Trump saw media coverage about Mr. Huang being absent from the delegation, the
president asked him to
join the trip by meeting Air Force One during a layover in Alaska. The
president drafted a social media post saying that it was an honor to have “the
Great Jensen Huang,” and other business leaders “journeying to the Great
Country of China where I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary
distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their
magic.”
The New
York Times reported
last month that Mr. Trump was briefed roughly a year ago that the U.S.
intelligence community had electronic surveillance of Ms. Huang, and believed
that she was an operative working for China’s intelligence services. The
surveillance revealed a close relationship between Ms. Huang and a U.S.
citizen. When officials asked for the name of the U.S. citizen to be “unmasked”
— given Americans’ identities are routinely protected from foreign surveillance
— it was revealed to be the Nvidia chief executive.
The
president chose at that point not to take any action. He has viewed Nvidia’s
chips as integral to America’s competition with China in A.I. He sees Nvidia’s
success as crucial to maintaining a robust stock market.
Asked
about Mr. Huang’s admission to his company about his affair with Ms. Huang, Mr.
Trump told reporters on Sunday evening that he did not regret his own lack of
action.
“No, I
don’t think so,” the president said. He added that he believed Mr. Huang should
stay on as Nvidia’s chief executive.
“I think
he’s an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You have to
hear it,” Mr. Trump said.
Ms. Huang
speaks English well and has relationships with executives at the highest levels
of the A.I. chip industry, including with Mr. Huang and the leaders of
Gigabyte, one of the top assemblers of Nvidia supercomputers, people who have
met her said.
It is
unclear when Ms. Huang first met Nvidia’s leader. In 2024, around the time the
two of them were photographed together with other industry executives at a bar
in Taipei, her company, Megaspeed,
began a multibillion-dollar purchase of advanced A.I. microchips.
Nvidia
officials have said that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not
unusual or unexpected” and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with
any of Nvidia’s many customers. The company has also said customers like
Megaspeed do not receive classified business information.
In recent
years, Megaspeed, despite having essentially a storefront office and little
local footprint, purchased $2 billion worth of Nvidia’s products. Megaspeed
builds data centers in Southeast Asia that rent out their computing power to
Alibaba, the giant Chinese internet company. U.S. officials suspect Megaspeed
has been helping smuggle restricted advanced Nvidia chips into China.
Ms. Huang
has not responded to attempts to reach her.
Maggie Haberman is a
White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
Jonathan Swan is a White
House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J.
Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941
Julian E. Barnes covers
the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The
Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Tripp Mickle reports for The
Times on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google
and Apple. He also writes about tech industry trends like layoffs and
artificial intelligence.
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