Trump Bought Nvidia Stock Days Before Rescinding the Rule That Restricted Nvidia's Sales to China

Financial disclosures show the president purchased $1-5M in Nvidia shares immediately before policy decisions that boosted the chipmaker's value — a textbook self-dealing pattern with national security costs.

Donald Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in Nvidia stock in the days before his administration rescinded a Biden-era rule restricting advanced AI chip exports to China, according to an analysis by the anti-corruption group DeKleptocracy based on Trump's own public financial disclosures. The timing is precise: buy the stock, then remove the restriction that suppressed its value. Nvidia's shares rose immediately after the rescission announcement.

The rescinded rule — the AI Diffusion Rule — existed to prevent America's most advanced chips from reaching China, which was widely regarded as a national security imperative. China accounted for roughly a quarter of Nvidia's sales between 2010 and 2022. Removing the export restriction didn't just benefit Nvidia's balance sheet; it reopened one of the company's largest markets. The pattern repeated. In December 2025, Trump announced he would allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips to China — chips described by experts as six times more powerful than anything available in the country at the time. The Department of Commerce greenlit the decision in January 2026. In the days after the H200 announcement, Trump's disclosures show at least three additional Nvidia purchases, each between $250,001 and $500,000. The Council on Foreign Relations warned that selling H200s would "supercharge" China's future AI factories. The broader context makes the financial self-dealing look worse. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's former CEO, has been described as a close Trump ally and met the president multiple times. Nvidia contributed $25 million to Trump's ballroom in October 2025, with Huang saying he was "delighted to be a part of it." Meanwhile, reports indicate that Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy whose company Megaspeed obtained billions worth of Nvidia chips while other companies struggled. Trump was twice briefed by intelligence officials that Alice Huang was a Chinese asset. He did not act on the assessment. The structure here is not subtle. A president buys stock in a company, makes policy decisions that increase that stock's value, and the company's former CEO is both a political donor and entangled in a Chinese intelligence operation. DeKleptocracy's analysis frames the question plainly: while the country debates whether a possible Chinese spy manipulated policy for one AI company, it must also reckon with whether the president's personal financial interests motivated him to deliver the entire AI industry's technology to a strategic rival. The financial disclosures are public, filed under OGE Form 278. The trades are not alleged — they are reported by the president himself. The policy decisions are matters of public record. What remains unresolved is whether any institutional mechanism exists to investigate or constrain a sitting president who trades on his own policy announcements. The answer, so far, appears to be no. This is not a story about chip policy or trade strategy. It is a story about whether the American presidency now functions as an insider-trading vehicle — one where the trader also writes the rules, appoints the regulators, and ignores the intelligence briefings that might complicate the trade.