There is speculation that U.S. President Donald Trump will not bring up allegations that former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was involved with Chinese spies during next week’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
On the 14th (local time), the Financial Times (FT) of the U.K. reported that U.S. officials drew a line, saying Nvidia-related matters are separate from the U.S.-China summit. A U.S. government official said, “We do not expect President Trump to raise the Alice Huang matter.”
Another U.S. official said, “The Nvidia situation should not affect this visit in any way.” The official added, “Export controls are not up for negotiation in any talks or deals with China,” and, “Export controls are a national security matter decided through interagency consultation, and we do not expect this issue to be addressed in conversations with the Chinese side during the trip.”
This appears to reflect the Trump administration’s principle that it will not treat semiconductor export controls as a bargaining chip with China, and its view that the former CEO Huang’s private-life issue could impose an unnecessary burden on the summit.
Given that Washington has already shown some flexibility on semiconductor exports to China, it may have also judged there is little to gain by raising the spy allegations at the summit.
Alice Huang is a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singaporean company that was a Nvidia client, and she was found to have had an extramarital relationship with the former CEO Huang. Megaspeed is also under suspicion of evading U.S. export control rules to ship Nvidia chips to China.
President Trump is set to visit China from the 17th to the 19th to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen and hold a bilateral meeting with Xi on the 19th. An unprecedented U.S.-China-Russia three-way summit, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, will also be held.
