U.S. President Donald Trump has said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang personally told him that he had no idea Alice Huang, the Megaspeed executive at the centre of a reported Chinese intelligence operation, was a spy, and that he believes him.
Speaking to reporters, Trump was asked whether he knew about the alleged ties when he travelled to China in May, with Huang among the tech CEOs on the trip. “No. I didn’t hear about it then,” Trump said, adding that “a lot of people have heard about it” and that Huang “totally denies” it.
Trump said he had spoken to Huang that day to check how he was doing, and had put the question to him directly. “He said he had absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy,” Trump said. Asked whether he was concerned, he replied: “I really believe him.”
The comments come as Huang faces pressure on several fronts. The New York Times reported on October 29 that U.S. officials had concluded Alice Huang, who has no relation to Jensen, was a Chinese intelligence asset who had developed a close relationship with him. The Times also reported that Trump was briefed on the intelligence roughly a year ago but took no action, and that officials at the time did not believe Huang knew what she was allegedly doing, though some in the administration have since questioned whether he could have remained unaware.
Huang has since admitted to being unfaithful to his wife in a memo to Nvidia employees, and the company’s board has opened an independent probe into reports that he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. Huang’s wife, Lori, and two of their children work at or have ties to Nvidia, and his eldest daughter Madison cancelled a planned trip to Seoul for an Nvidia event, citing a family matter. Huang has also dropped out of the ElevenLabs Summit in New York and an Anthropic CEO forum.
Trump’s remarks are the latest in a series of public statements of support. Shortly after the Times report, he called Huang “brilliant” and said the U.S. would look into the matter “very closely”. He also said he would like to keep Huang as an adviser “unless we find out something to the contrary”, a caveat that now sits alongside his stated belief in Huang’s account.
The allegations against Alice Huang have not been independently confirmed. Nvidia has said Huang’s interactions with her were not unusual for a CEO who meets thousands of customer executives each year, the Chinese embassy has called the claims groundless, and Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs has said it conducted no investigation into her alleged ties to China.