Should Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang be exonerated of any wrongdoing after his affair with an alleged spy? Maybe now that he has a morally upstanding character witness like president Donald Trump on his side.
During a presser Monday night, Trump defended Huang as an “honorable guy” after revealing that Huang had personally told him that he didn’t know that the Chinese businesswoman he was cheating on his wife with with was allegedly a Beijing operative.
“I asked him that question: ‘Did you have any idea that she was a spy?’” Trump told reporters at the White House, per the New York Times. “He said, ‘I had no idea that she was a spy,’ and I really believe him.”
The geopolitical gravity of the situation appeared a distant concern to Trump, who expressed a greater concern for Huang’s wellbeing.
“I did speak to him today just to see if he’s feeling all right,” Trump continued. “I believe he’s suffering greatly. I read his statement, and I believe he’s suffering greatly. More so because of his family, his wife who he loves and his family, but he is definitely suffering.”
When Trump was asked whether he intended to bring up the matter with president Xi Jinping during his visit to Shenzhen, China, next week, he instinctively began defending Huang yet again.
“I’m sure President Xi will ask me about it,” Trump said, before pivoting. “I just know Jensen very well. I just think he’s a very honorable man. I mean, he’s a great — he built a great company, American company, and I think he’s a very honorable guy. And I feel very confident that he’ll be in good shape.”
Huang is being accused of fooling around with Alice Huang, a top executive at the Singapore-based data center and cloud computing firm Megaspeed. The affair, which he later admitted to in a humiliating statement to his company employees, could have massive effects on the AI industry.
The US government is alleging that Alice Huang was recruited by China’s Ministry of State Security to gather intel on Jensen Huang and possibly even push him to sell Nvidia’s coveted AI chips to China. The Chinese government denies this, and whether she was indeed a spy or just an opportunist — or, heck, if she was motivated by true love — remains unclear.
The whole saga stinks to high heaven, though. Megaspeed was being investigated for allegedly diverting its Nvidia chips to the mainland, circumventing a US export ban on AI hardware to China. Nvidia, meanwhile, reportedly used its influence to abruptly quash the US Commerce Department into Megaspeed.
For Trump to defend Huang isn’t too surprising. The pair have a close relationship, and Huang is widely considered too important of a figure in the AI boom to go down; it’s his company that’s providing all the hardware, and in many cases the money, to keep the gravy train chugging along.
And he has his own skeletons in the closet, after all, with numerous cheating scandals and an even uglier rap sheet of sexual harassment and rape allegations. It’s solidarity from one unfaithful billionaire to another.
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