US President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, US, November 9, 2026. REUTERS Aaron Schwartz
Jensen Huang, the married founder of NVIDIA, has now admitted to a relationship with a woman who was recently exposed as a groomed and prepared Chinese spy. It’s a tricky relationship because Huang has been one of the major proponents of selling controversial AI chips to Chinese companies that could install them in Chinese military weapons for use against U.S. allies.
But despite Huang’s tight connection to Trump and White House policy, Trump took the quickest route when confronted by the press on his friend’s potential criminality. He denied it’s knowledge.
“I didn't hear about it then," Trump said when asked about Huang’s girlfriend spy. "But a lot of people have heard about it. And Jensen totally denies that. I spoke to him today, just to see if he's feeling all right, how you doing. And I asked him about that. I asked him, ‘Did you have any idea that she was a spy?’ He said, ‘I had no idea that she was a spy.’ And I really believe him."
But Trump biographer Michael Wolff, who has written several books about Trump and has plenty of insight into his mind, said Trump is a consummate liar. So, if Trump says he didn’t know about something — rest easy with the likelihood that he did.
“Donald Trump and Mr. Huang speak often, and seem to have developed quite a close relationship,” said Wolff, speaking with co-host Joanna Coles on a Wednesday podcast. “Mr. Huang seems to have become one of Trump’s main connections to the tech and AI industries, and Donald Trump has become one of Mr. Huang’s major supporters in government. So how is it that Donald Trump was not aware of this?”
“The intelligence services have said that they told Trump,” Coles pointed out, “but he says he has no memory of being told.”
“Of course he knew. Of course he was aware,” said Wolff. “The other fact of this is that this was an investigation that began in the Commerce Department. The relationship and her likely status as working for the Chinese government were, as I understand it, inadvertently established in this investigation. But then this investigation was taken over, was removed from the Commerce Department, and became a Justice Department investigation. Obviously, within the Justice Department, Trump himself would have much more control over this. He and Todd Blanche could have handled this there. Then, from somewhere in the executive branch, it leaked to the New York Times. So, this leak was obviously not good for Mr. Huang, but also not good for Donald Trump.”
A Fox News guest and expert on China warned last week that White House officials could be “taken down” due to their collaboration with the business mogul. Attorney Gordon Chang – a China researcher with the right-wing think tank Galestone Institute – said Huang’s proximity to President Donald Trump represents a “critical national security violation.”
And former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe called the very idea of a spy planting a puppet directly in Trump’s ear “a Grand Slam in the bottom of the ninth.”
“This is unbelievable,” said McCabe. “Huang has been pushing for easing restrictions by the Trump administration on Nvidia selling chips to China. And he got them. He got them in return for the ability to sell Nvidia chips to China in return for giving the United States government 25 percent of that sale. That alone is off the charts.”