Trump doesnt plan to raise Nvidia, spy issue during China trip: U.S. officials

President Donald Trump is not expected to raise allegations of a Chinese intelligence operation involving former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, senior U.S. officials said Friday.

Officials also said that Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, will accompany Trump on the trip to Shenzhen, China, for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on Nov. 18 and 19.

The White House, earlier Friday, said Trump plans to have a three-way summit there with Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Jensen Huang’s relationship with the suspected spy, Alice Huang, who is not related to him, has raised concerns that a Singapore-based company where she was an executive diverted restricted Nvidia chips to China.

“The situation with Nvidia should not really have any bearing on the trip,” an official said on the press call, speaking on the condition that they not be identified.

“In all of our discussions and negotiations with the Chinese, we do not negotiate American export controls … and we don’t expect it to figure at all in any of our conversations with the Chinese while we’re there.”

Asked if Trump would raise the allegations against Alice Huang to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the official said, “The focus of a meeting with President Xi, at least on the economic side, is going to be about implementation of the trade agreement.”

“When it comes to some of these national security matters and examinations and investigations that are going on in the U.S., [that is] probably not something that we’re going to read the Chinese in on at this moment,” the official said.

Another official said, “I don’t expect the president to raise it — the Alice Huang issue.”

China has called the allegations against Alice Huang baseless.

Huang resigned this week as Nvidia’s CEO after damning reports that he had an affair with Alice Huang, who was an executive of Megaspeed, a cloud-computing company that is being eyed for possible facilitation of sending billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips in violation of U.S. restrictions on those chips.

The scandal has rocked Nvidia and raised questions about whether the Commerce Department, which is led by Howard Lutnick, has been aggressive enough at blocking advanced chips from ending up in China.

During Friday’s call, a reporter asked why Musk was going on the trip with Trump.

“I don’t want to speak for the president on exactly why Elon’s going,” an official said.

“Obviously, he has tremendous business interests in the U.S.-China relationship. He’s a big part of our national security,” the official said. “There are numerous reasons, given the engagement that the president is going to have, where I think Elon would be of tremendous benefit, just even as an advisor to the president.”