Trump: He Probably Has an Excuse

A man admitted to an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence believes was a spy for China. The president who was briefed on that spy a year ago says the man "probably has an excuse."

"I think he's an honourable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it."

— President Donald Trump, to reporters, Sunday

The board of the most valuable company on earth announced on Sunday that it is launching an independent investigation into its own chief executive. The investigation is not about fraud, not about a product, and not about accounting. It is about a romance. Specifically, a romance with a woman whom U.S. intelligence agencies concluded was collecting information for Beijing, carried out while her company bought $4.8 billion of Nvidia's chips.

Jensen Huang, 63, has run Nvidia for more than three decades and built it into the engine of the global AI boom. In a letter to employees obtained by the Associated Press, he admitted he was "unfaithful to my wife."

"My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry," he wrote. "Leading Nvidia is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility."

The board's statement was more careful. The inquiry was opened "in light of recent reporting that founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort," it said, adding that the board has "no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised."

Translation: the company that sells the chips the spy allegedly wanted is now trying to figure out whether the spy got them.

Huang is staying. "Today's news will not slow Nvidia," spokesperson John Rizzo said. "Jensen is committed to continuing to lead Nvidia as CEO without interruption."

The woman in the story is Alice Huang. She and the CEO are not related. She was once a television reporter in China, then a top executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore data center firm that calls itself a "core business partner" of Nvidia's computing cloud in Asia. Over the past two years, Megaspeed bought more than $4.8 billion of Nvidia chips, according to The New York Times, which first reported the relationship in late October.

U.S. intelligence agencies had been monitoring Alice Huang and concluded she was acting on behalf of the Chinese government, the Times reported. Surveillance picked up communications between her and an American citizen, who was identified in a process known as unmasking. His name, it turned out, was Jensen Huang.

What, exactly, was passed to Beijing remains unclear. How valuable it was remains unclear. When the collection began remains unclear. What is clear is the access: the most powerful chip company on earth had a senior Chinese businesswoman in its inner orbit, and her company was one of Nvidia's biggest customers in the region.

China denied the whole affair. "The allegations about Chinese spies are entirely groundless, speculative and intended to smear and malign China," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters in Beijing.

The least comfortable detail in the entire story is one sentence from the Times' October reporting: President Trump was briefed last year on intelligence alleging that Alice Huang was spying for China.

A year. The intelligence community identified a Chinese operative embedded in the inner circle of the most important technology company in the national-security competition with China, and the president heard about it. And then, on Sunday, asked whether he now wished he had "acted on the intelligence" at the time, the answer came out smooth and unhurried.

"No, I don't think so," Trump said. "I think he's an honourable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. He's done an amazing job for our country."

He added that he had not spoken with Huang since the news broke, that Huang "has done such an incredible job," and that he would "certainly take him" on his Asia trip next week. Huang serves on the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, departing for a G7 meeting in Paris, declined to comment on the situation. "I just can't comment because of the nature of it," he said, which, according to the Times, was also the title of the memo he oversaw the drafting of last spring, the memo that warned the administration about Huang's relationship with the alleged spy.

A president briefed on a spy inside the American tech industry. A secretary of state who drafted the warning memo. A week later, a press scrum in which the compromised CEO is declared an honourable man who probably has an excuse.

There is a second irony, and it is about money. The product at the center of the espionage operation is the same product the administration has been selling to China.

In January, the Trump administration said it would allow Nvidia to sell its H200 chips, its second most advanced semiconductor, to Chinese customers under certain conditions. Those were the chips Washington had restricted because they would give China's technology industry an edge. And the company on the other side of the alleged espionage relationship was a customer that had bought $4.8 billion of them.

Translation: the front door was open. The spy's company bought its chips through ordinary commercial channels, from the company she was allegedly spying on, with the blessing of the president's own trade policy.

Megaspeed, for its part, told the Times that its current leadership took the allegations seriously and had appointed external legal advisers to conduct an internal investigation.

Washington is moving on both sides of the aisle. Last week, three House Republican committee leaders wrote to Huang asking him to appear before Congress later this month to discuss Nvidia's "security protocols against foreign adversary espionage." "The issue of PRC infiltration and access to cutting-edge US technology is core to the investigative work of our three committees this Congress," the letter said.

The Democrats who won back both chambers last week, many on explicitly anti-AI platforms, are preparing wide-ranging investigations of their own, and the November ballot measures, all but one of which restricted new data center construction, handed them a ready-made first stop. The market noticed.

On Monday, Nvidia shares fell more than 6 percent at the open while the Nasdaq rose. The company reported quarterly profits of $59.69 billion in August. Huang is its fifth largest shareholder, holding roughly 3.6 percent, and he does not have majority voting control, which is the only reason this story has any suspense in it at all.

"Jensen has two sets of enemies in Washington: China hawks who want the export door shut, and the crowd trying to stop the data center buildout," Michael Monaghan, a portfolio manager, told Al Jazeera. "The longer this drags, the stronger they get."

The board now has a job. Not to determine whether Jensen Huang slept with a spy. That part is settled. He admitted the affair in a letter to his own employees. Its job is to determine whether the intelligence was true, whether anything was compromised, and whether the man who led the most valuable company in the world into the middle of a foreign intelligence operation can be trusted with its secrets.

Huang, for his part, closed his letter with a line that sounds like it was written for the White House as much as for the board. "I love our country and our company," he wrote. "I am proud and grateful to be an American."

The president has already cast his vote on the case: honourable, excusable, an amazing job. The board will take its time. Congress will take its time. But the one person in the world who had a year to act on the intelligence apparently chose, instead, to pre-judge the defendant.

The question isn't whether the affair was embarrassing. The question is who gets to decide whether a spy's target deserves an excuse, and why the man who was told about the spy a year ago is the same man insisting that probably, he does.