Report: Trump Shelved China Spy Warning Partly Over Nvidia Sales
A New York Times investigation says Trump took no action after an intelligence briefing about someone close to Nvidia's chief executive. Nvidia says its customers received no sensitive secrets and disputes allegations involving chip diversion.
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President Donald Trump took no action after a warning of suspected Chinese espionage involving Nvidia's chief executive, partly over chip-sales concerns, according to a New York Times investigation.
US intelligence agencies concluded that a former senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud company, was passing information to Beijing and had developed close ties to Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, according to people briefed on classified surveillance who spoke to the Times.
Those people told the Times that Trump received a briefing about a year earlier concerning someone with direct access to Huang. They said concern about disrupting Nvidia's sales and the US-China trade relationship was among his reasons for taking no action.
Nvidia spokesperson John Rizzo said Huang's interactions with the former executive were not unusual, describing meetings with customers as part of a chief executive's work. The company says cloud customers received ordinary business information, not sensitive trade secrets or information relevant to national security.
Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Chang said the accusations against the former executive were baseless, calling them "groundless smears and slanders", according to the Times account. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, The Hill said.
The underlying intelligence has not been made public or independently confirmed. The people cited by the Times did not specify what information they believed reached Beijing, and their account does not establish that Trump acted specifically to protect Nvidia's share price.
