Rubio Warned Officials About Nvidia Chief’s Entanglement With Chinese Spy - the New York Times

Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, and Tripp Mickle, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

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.”

This Huang-Huang affair explains a few things that until now didn’t make sense, and Jensen Huang not being invited on that May trip to China — until Trump invited him on the fly at the Alaska layover — is one of them. Also worth noting that on multi-byline stories, The Times puts them in order of who contributed the most to the story. In this case it’s Haberman, who is closest to Trump and the White House:

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.

Trump, you will recall, was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his hush-money payments to porno star Stormy Daniels, who banged him and (spanked him with a magazine on which he was on the cover) at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006. That was four months after Melania Trump, his third wife, gave birth to their son Barron. So take “he probably has an excuse for it” with a $130,000 grain of salt.

There’s a Journalism 101 adage that news stories should be written in an “upside down triangle”, with the most important information at the top and the least important at the bottom. Another little inside-baseball tidbit about The Times, however, is that The Times, rather uniquely, often buries the most interesting (but not most important) paragraph at the very end. This story ends thus:

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.

If true, this is politically damaging to both Nvidia and Huang personally, but the context is that Nvidia booked over $300 billion in revenue over the last year.

★ Monday, 9 November 2026