Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw a classified memo this spring warning senior Trump administration officials that the chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, was in a close relationship with a woman US intelligence officials believed had been recruited as a Chinese spy, according to a report in The New York Times.

The memo, based on electronic surveillance, concluded that Alice Huang, a senior executive at the Singapore-based company Megaspeed, had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security, the country's main intelligence agency. The two people are not related. The warning was circulated among officials with high-level security clearances before President Donald Trump's visit to China in May.

The disclosure adds a new dimension to a scandal that broke on Sunday, when Nvidia's board announced an independent investigation after Huang admitted to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife. In a message to staff, Huang wrote: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."

Nvidia said its board was opening the inquiry in light of reports that Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The company said the review would be conducted by independent directors and outside counsel, and stressed that it had "no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised". The board added that it retained confidence in Huang and his leadership team, and said he fully supported the review and had committed to cooperating with it.

According to the Times, Trump himself had been briefed about a year earlier on US intelligence surveillance of Alice Huang and her suspected ties to Chinese intelligence, and decided against taking action at the time. The president defended Huang on Sunday night, calling him an "honorable guy" and a "fine person" and telling reporters: "He's done an amazing job for our country. I haven't heard that he's done anything wrong."

Megaspeed, where Alice Huang is an executive, is under US investigation over accusations that it helped smuggle advanced Nvidia graphics processing units into China to get around American export restrictions on cutting-edge technology. The company purchased billions of dollars' worth of Nvidia products in recent years, including about $2 billion worth of chips, despite having a relatively small local presence in Singapore.

Huang, 63, founded Nvidia and has served as its president and chief executive since the company began in 1993. He married Lori Mills in 1985, and the couple have two children. He has become one of the most influential figures in the Trump administration's technology policy, arguing against very tight restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips to China and pressing the administration to ease the limits imposed under the previous government.

The Times reported that Huang was initially left out of the delegation of American business and technology executives who accompanied Trump on his May trip to China, despite leading one of the world's most valuable companies, valued at about $4.5 trillion. It remains unclear whether that decision was connected to the intelligence warning. Some administration officials were already concerned about Huang's influence on Trump's approach to AI regulation, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the newspaper.

The revelations raise questions about whether Chinese intelligence sought to exploit Huang's personal relationship as Beijing tries to narrow the US lead in artificial intelligence, and about how much the administration knew before Huang continued to shape its chip-export policy. Neither the White House nor Nvidia has said whether any sensitive information changed hands, and there is no public evidence that Huang knowingly cooperated with Chinese intelligence.