President Trump called Jensen Huang on Tuesday, before the Nvidia chief stepped down amid a rapidly unfolding spy scandal, and urged him to keep fighting for his job, according to two people briefed on the conversation.
The call was the latest instance of Mr. Trump defending and protecting Mr. Huang, who had become a high-profile ally and an influential adviser on artificial intelligence. The president continued to back him to the end, even after U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Mr. Huang was having an affair with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy.
Nvidia announced on Thursday that Mr. Huang, who built the company into the world’s leading supplier of advanced A.I. chips, had been replaced as chief executive following revelations not just of the affair with the woman suspected of being a spy, but also another with one of his employees.
A representative for Mr. Huang did not provide a comment for this article. Neither Mr. Trump nor the White House responded to requests for comment about his call to Mr. Huang.
The president had been warned at least twice about Mr. Huang’s relationship with a Chinese citizen known as Alice Huang, whom intelligence agencies concluded had been recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security, The New York Times has reported. The first warning was late last year, and the second was in the spring.
Mr. Trump took no action either time, and brought Mr. Huang with him on a trip to China in May. In recent days, he has publicly praised Mr. Huang and expressed sympathy for him, saying in a social media post on Thursday that he was a “legend.”
The president’s advisers said he was blasé about the national security implications when told of the intelligence community assessments related to Mr. Huang. One aide said that Mr. Trump saw the episode mainly through the lens of adultery, and that the president dismissed the idea of Mr. Huang’s entanglement posing a threat to the country.
Mr. Trump saw Nvidia as essentially too big to fail, aides said. The company, one of the world’s largest by market capitalization, has played a vital role in the global economy and underpinned the president’s hopes for A.I. dominance over China.
Advisers to Mr. Trump gave several explanations for the way he had handled the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations.
Chief among them was that the president had invested greatly in Mr. Huang, whom he saw as a modern-day Henry Ford, leading in a technology that could define the century.
Mr. Trump viewed Nvidia’s fortunes as bound up with those of the U.S. economy and the stock market. When reports surfaced that the company’s board was considering removing Mr. Huang, Mr. Trump asked confidants what they thought would happen to the markets. He was worried that Mr. Huang’s ouster could cause a sharp downturn.
The president’s last-ditch effort to save Mr. Huang was a remarkable moment in a relationship that barely existed two years ago.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Huang was nowhere on his radar. The Nvidia founder had no real presence in Washington. He did not lobby or give to campaigns, and showed little interest in politics. The Biden administration’s sweeping restrictions on chip exports forced Mr. Huang to be more attentive to Washington, but he still did far less politicking than his rivals. In contrast to other tech leaders, he did not attend Mr. Trump’s second inauguration.
With evident relish, Mr. Trump has told the story of first hearing Mr. Huang’s name. “Who the hell is he? What’s his name?” he has recalled to associates. “His name is Jensen Huang of Nvidia. I said, ‘What the hell is Nvidia?’”
By late 2024, Mr. Trump had learned that Mr. Huang was the indispensable man at the company that controlled at least 80 percent of the market for chips used to train the most advanced A.I. models. And Mr. Huang saw an opening to woo a president who demanded personal attention and responded to flattery.
In April 2025, Mr. Huang and his wife, Lori, attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Trump and a group of tech and crypto donors. The president came away intrigued, and the more he learned, the more impressed he became. He was told again and again that the A.I. boom ran almost entirely through Nvidia. “You’re taking over the world, Jensen,” Mr. Trump would later tell him.
Mr. Huang offered something the president had failed to get in his first term and hoped to achieve in his second. During his first administration, Mr. Trump had pledged to bring back coal and steel jobs. But those industries never returned to their old strength.
In a second term, A.I. offered another route to the reindustrialization of the United States that Mr. Trump had promised voters. He came to believe that the rush to build data centers, and their enormous appetite for electricity, could produce a manufacturing revival and keep an otherwise shaky economy running hot. To the president, that made the leaders of the A.I. companies the most valuable executives in the country, and Mr. Huang perhaps the most valuable of them all.
Mr. Huang played into that savior role. In 2025, he said Nvidia would produce up to $500 billion of A.I. infrastructure in the United States. He also praised the president lavishly.
“America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump,” he said that July. He traveled with Mr. Trump to the Persian Gulf in May 2025, where the president announced deals for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to buy Nvidia chips. He provided the kind of deal-making headlines that Mr. Trump craved.
Mr. Huang had persuaded Mr. Trump that Nvidia should sell its chips as widely as possible, so that the world would build on U.S., rather than Chinese, technology. David Sacks, the White House’s A.I. and crypto czar, backed him. The two men helped persuade Mr. Trump to plant himself on the unpopular side of a major issue for the populist right.
China hawks on the MAGA right, including Stephen K. Bannon, wanted chip sales to China banned outright. But Mr. Trump sided with Mr. Huang and his billionaire counterparts leading other tech companies, including OpenAI, Meta and SpaceX.
At Mr. Huang’s urging, Mr. Trump allowed Nvidia to sell certain models of its chips to China under an unusual arrangement in which the federal government took 15 percent, and later 25 percent, of the revenue. Critics raised legal questions and warned that national security was being sold out. Administration officials privately marveled at how much sway Mr. Huang seemed to have with the president.
Some U.S. officials had worried about Mr. Huang long before the spy scandal broke into the open this fall. They saw him as, at best, naïve and careless in his dealings with Chinese executives and local officials, with whom he kept close ties. Some wondered how he could possibly have been oblivious to Ms. Huang’s possible connections to Chinese intelligence.
But Mr. Trump was never likely to share in those national security concerns. While he has used bellicose campaign rhetoric against China — he has accused Beijing of “raping” the American economy and made that line of attack a focus of his 2016 presidential campaign — he has never been a China hawk in any conventional sense.
Throughout the president’s terms, his aggressive posture on China has been limited to trade. And even there he has repeatedly shown he would rather cut a deal with Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, than engage in a protracted trade war.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Mr. Trump has largely ignored Beijing’s human rights abuses. Asked in 2020 why he had not imposed sanctions over the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, he said, “Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal.”
People close to the president say that in private, he has questioned why the United States would ever go to war over Taiwan.
To dramatize his disregard for the small island nation, Mr. Trump has been known to hold up a teaspoon to lunch guests at his golf club and say, “This is Taiwan.”
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