Trump unlikely to discuss Alice Huang case with Xi Jinping at APEC Summit

US President Donald Trump is unlikely to discuss the matter of businesswoman Alice Huang with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Shenzhen, China. Alice's ties to former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had raised panic among the national security hawks in Washington. Trump himself said that he does not intend to discuss Huang with Xi, but he might bring it up.

Trump will travel to the Philippines on Tuesday for the Southeast Asian Nations Summit (ASEAN) and then move towards China in a four-day trip to Asia. “I don’t expect the president to raise it — the Alice Huang issue,” said one senior official of the Trump administration.

Another senior official from the Trump administration said that though semiconductors have been a major flashpoint between the US and China, Trump is unlikely to raise it now.

“When it comes to some of these national security matters and examinations and investigations that are going on in the U.S., it’s probably not something that we’re going to read the Chinese in on at this moment,” said another senior official of the Trump administration, as reported by Politico.

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Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed International, a Singapore-based customer of Nvidia, is unrelated to Nvidia's Jensen Huang. US authorities reportedly suspect she was spying for China, and there are concerns that her company diverted restricted Nvidia chips to China. Beijing denies she is a spy and calls the allegations baseless. There has been no independent verification of whether she acted for the Chinese government or whether Megaspeed diverted chips to China; most of the reports are attributed to intelligence leaks.
The case went public after The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported on Jensen Huang's relationship with her just ahead of the US midterms. Then after the midterms, Huang admitted infidelity. He has since resigned as Nvidia's chief executive. On Tuesday, Nvidia's independent directors said they had hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct an independent investigation.
Jensen Huang has been a prominent voice in Trump's China policy, lobbying to preserve Nvidia's chip sales to the Chinese market. He joined Trump's May trip to Beijing. He was supposed to join Trump at the upcoming APEC CEO Summit, but Nvidia was later dropped from the roster.