The Irish Times published on Sunday a column by Maureen Dowd that first appeared in The New York Times. It puts President Donald Trump and Jensen Huang, whom Dowd calls the fallen Nvidia chief, in the same charge: at a perilous moment, they are not holding back the risks around artificial intelligence and advanced chips.

Dowd writes that Huang dismissed the risks of AI and lobbied Trump to lift export restrictions on selling advanced chips to China. Asked whether it mattered whether China or the United States won the AI contest, Huang said, according to the column: “I don’t think it does.”

Dowd also describes an April dinner at Mar-a-Lago, at $1 million a head, where Huang made his case to Trump to let Nvidia do business with China while the administration weighed an export ban. The column says sales were shut down days later, and that a few months afterwards Trump reversed course and allowed the company to sell certain chips to China if the government received 15 per cent of the revenue. Dowd’s conclusion is that Trump says America cannot slow AI if it is to stay ahead of China, while making moves that help China catch up.

The column presents Alice Huang, with whom Jensen Huang was involved, as a woman “whom US intelligence identified as a Chinese spy”. Dowd points to a New York Times report from more than a year ago: Alice Huang’s firm, Megaspeed, was obtaining billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia’s most advanced products and distributing them to data centres in Malaysia and Indonesia, and perhaps passing them on to China.

On the administration, Dowd writes that on 5 November Treasury secretary Scott Bessent confronted Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, asking why chip sales to Megaspeed had not already been banned, and that on Friday Bessent told CNBC the Treasury had been pushing for the step for months. CNBC’s account of that interview is that Bessent said Treasury, Defense, State and the trade representative’s office had favoured putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months, but that “Commerce has the pen”. Commerce spokeswoman Kristen Eichamer told CNBC that Bessent and Lutnick had “no such conversation” in the Situation Room. Bessent said he does not repeat conversations held there.

Dowd adds, citing the New York Times, that the president was more sympathetic to Lutnick’s position. In the column, Marco Rubio had warned top Trump officials since the spring about the liaison between the two Huangs, and Trump brushed it off, tied to his need for a stock market buoyed by Nvidia. On the company, Dowd says Nvidia has lost more than a trillion dollars in market value since the spy story broke. Her close: when AI needs to be brought under control before it takes control, Huang, Lutnick and Trump “aren’t looking out for us”.

Image: Wikimedia Commons — Jensen Huang, then Nvidia’s chief executive, surrounded by students after a Stanford class on 30 April 2026 (Anders Eidesvik, CC BY 4.0). The photo is not from the column and is not from after the resignation.

Sources consulted: Maureen Dowd: Trump and Jensen Huang are letting us down — The Irish Times; Bessent blames Lutnick’s Commerce for Nvidia chip leakage — CNBC.