Trump Bought Nvidia Shares Worth Half A Million, Then His Government Let Nvidia Sell Its Chips to China

Donald Trump's stock portfolio and his administration's China chip policy keep crossing paths, and the overlap is getting harder to ignore. Disclosures filed with the US Office of Government Ethics show that the president's accounts bought Nvidia shares around the time his government loosened the rules on selling the company's advanced AI chips to China.

A Purchase, Then An Approval, One Week Apart

The trade getting the most attention was made on January 6. That day Trump bought between $500,000 and $1 million of Nvidia stock. A week later, the Commerce Department approved the sale of some Nvidia AI chips to China.

It wasn't a one-off. The disclosure listed 15 Nvidia transactions during the quarter, and Trump's advisers bought at least $1.75 million of the company's shares. By the time the China approvals were announced, his accounts held between $1 million and $5 million in Nvidia stock.

The chips at the centre of this are Nvidia's H200 processors, the company's most commercially advanced AI chips. They had been explicitly banned from export to China under earlier export control rules.

Air Force One, Beijing And A Jump in Nvidia's Share Price

In May the export story moved from paperwork to diplomacy. Trump flew to China with a group of top American chief executives, but only two of them travelled on Air Force One with him: Elon Musk and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. The chip export approval was announced on the first day of the trip.

During the visit Trump approved H200 sales to around 10 Chinese companies. Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com were each cleared to buy up to 75,000 chips under the existing export licensing framework. The market liked it: Nvidia's stock rose more than 4%, taking its market value above $5.7 trillion.

The money at stake is large. Before export controls took hold, China made up 13% of Nvidia's revenue, and analysts estimate that reopening the Chinese market to H200s could be a $50 billion opportunity.

A Pattern That Goes Back To 2025

The January trade came after a series of decisions that went Nvidia's way:

• April 2025: the administration dropped plans to restrict exports of certain Nvidia chips after Huang attended a dinner at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club.
• December 2025: Trump said the US would allow H200 exports to China in return for a 25%  fee on those sales.
• Summer 2026: Trump disclosed buying up to $1.6 million and selling up to $1 million of Nvidia stock in August. The filing came out on the day he was due to present Huang with the National Medal of Science.

Nvidia also made commitments to Washington. It pledged to invest $500 billion in the US to help build a domestic chip ecosystem and gave $25 million to the White House ballroom.

'I Don't Get Involved'

The White House says there is no conflict of interest. A spokesperson said independent third-party financial institutions manage Trump's portfolio and replicate recognised indexes such as the Schwab 1000. Trump has said the same. Asked about his disclosures, he said he plays no role in managing the investments.

Critics point to how busy the account is. Trump made 3,642 stock trades in the first quarter alone. Portfolios that track an index usually trade rarely and mechanically, yet the August filing shows hundreds of transactions in a single month, including purchases and sales of the same stock.

There is also a legal gap. Presidents are exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest laws that bar other executive-branch officials from acting on matters in which they hold a financial stake.

Why It Matters Now

None of the filings show that Trump's holdings drove any particular decision. They do show that a sitting president with a documented stake in Nvidia signed off on the rules that decide where, and to whom, the company can sell its most advanced products.

The commercial payoff has also been slow to arrive. Despite the approvals, no deliveries had taken place as of the latest reports, and Chinese AI firms have been increasingly promoting domestic chips over Nvidia's. In August Nvidia told investors its forecast assumed zero revenue from data-centre hardware sales in China.

For investors watching from Wall Street to Dalal Street, the takeaway is that each export decision on Nvidia now gets read against the president's own holdings. That raises the political temperature, and the odds of a congressional inquiry, every time the rules change.