President Donald Trump was told aboard Air Force One in May en route to China that the United States had obtained sensitive intelligence showing that Nvidia’s CEO was in a relationship with a woman believed to be a Chinese spy, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The message was delivered by Marco Rubio, his secretary of state and national security adviser, shortly before the Nvidia leader, Jensen Huang, joined the presidential trip to Beijing at Trump’s invitation. It marked at least the second time in seven months that the president had been told of intelligence about Huang’s involvement with the woman.

The existence of the previously unreported update given to Trump contradicts the president’s assertion Monday that he had not known at the time of the trip about Huang’s relationship with the woman, who U.S. officials had concluded was working for China’s Ministry of State Security.

“No, I didn’t hear about it then,” Trump said when asked at a news conference whether he knew about Huang’s ties to the woman when he headed to a summit meeting with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.

When pressed on Monday about whether he had received a briefing on the issue last year, Trump, who has embraced Nvidia as key to U.S. technology competitiveness and a driver of the stock market’s rise over the past several years, said he would have to check.

Trump is scheduled to visit China again next week. He initially indicated he might invite Huang again, but on Monday, he said the Nvidia executive will not accompany him on the trip. The president said he did not plan to raise the matter with Xi when he meets the Chinese leader next week.

Trump’s previous trip to China, in May, has come under new scrutiny since the disclosures about the Nvidia leader’s relationship with Alice Huang, who had been an executive at a Singapore-based company called Megaspeed that purchases advanced Nvidia chips. The United States began restricting sales of advanced chips directly to China in late 2022, but it still allows Chinese companies to rent that computing power at data centers in Southeast Asia, like the ones Megaspeed operates.

The State Department declined to comment. Asked to comment, the White House press office declined to do so on the record. Instead, the office pointed to Trump’s remarks Monday. The email disputed the reporting for this article, without elaborating.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, Ana Swanson and Tripp Mickle/Demetrius Freeman
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