Trump Bought Nvidia Stock One Week Before His Own Government Approved a Billion-Dollar Nvidia Chip Deal With China

Federal ethics records show that Donald Trump's accounts purchased Nvidia stock on two separate occasions shortly before his own administration made regulatory decisions that sent the chipmaker's shares soaring.

A 113-page OGE Form 278-T disclosure, filed with the US Office of Government Ethics and certified by Trump on 8 May 2026, logged 3,642 individual securities transactions executed between January and March 2026, with a cumulative value ranging from at least £165 million to £564 million ($220 million to $750 million).

Buried inside that filing are two Nvidia purchases whose timing, when mapped against regulatory decisions taken by Trump's own Commerce Department, have triggered a wave of ethics scrutiny and renewed calls for a presidential trading ban. The White House has insisted there is no conflict of interest, but senior lawmakers have publicly disputed that claim.

Two Nvidia Purchases, Two Regulatory Decisions, One Week Apart Each Time

The first Nvidia trade in question took place on 6 January 2026, when Trump's accounts acquired between £376,000 and £752,000 ($500,000 and $1 million) in Nvidia securities, according to the OGE filings reviewed by NOTUS and CNBC.

Seven days later, on 13 January 2026, the Commerce Department formalised a new framework authorising the sale of Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence processors to approved Chinese companies, under a revenue-sharing arrangement requiring Nvidia to remit 25 per cent of China-related chip sales to the US government. The H200 is Nvidia's most commercially advanced chip for AI workloads. It had been explicitly banned from export to China under previous export control rules.

The second trade occurred on 10 February 2026. Trump's accounts bought between £752,000 and £3.76 million ($1 million and $5 million) in Nvidia stock on that single day. Approximately one week later, Nvidia announced a major computing deal with Meta, the social media and artificial intelligence company. The two transactions left Trump holding between £752,000 and £3.76 million ($1 million and $5 million) in Nvidia stock in total, at a time when his administration was actively shaping the regulatory environment that determines Nvidia's access to the world's second-largest economy.

The OGE filings report transaction values only in broad bands, so the exact figures remain opaque. The disclosure does not specify who placed the trades, and the forms do not indicate whether the purchases were solicited or unsolicited. A handwritten note on the cover page confirms Trump paid late filing fees, suggesting the 30-to-45-day disclosure window under 5 C.F.R. part 2634 was exceeded on at least one report.

Jensen Huang on Air Force One and the China H200 Clearance

The conflict-of-interest question sharpened further during Trump's 12 to 15 May 2026 Beijing summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was notably absent from the White House's advance list of executives making the trip. Then, after US media reported his exclusion, Trump personally called Huang and asked him to fly to Alaska to board Air Force One, CNBC reported, citing a source familiar with the situation. Huang confirmed the account directly to reporters in Beijing: 'President Trump asked me to come.'

On the first full day of the summit, 14 May 2026, Reuters published an exclusive report, confirmed by Lenovo in a public statement, that the US Commerce Department had cleared approximately 10 Chinese technology companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, to each purchase up to 75,000 H200 chips under the existing export-licensing framework.

Lenovo stated that it 'is one of several companies approved to sell H200 in China as part of Nvidia's export licence.' Nvidia's stock rose more than 4% on the news, pushing its market capitalisation above £4.28 trillion ($5.7 trillion), according to market data. Jensen Huang has described China's AI chip market as worth £37.6 billion ($50 billion) in 2026 alone.

Trump's financial stake in Nvidia during these decisions is a matter of public record. His accounts held between £752,000 and £3.76 million ($1 million and $5 million) in Nvidia stock when the China approvals were announced. A president with a disclosed Nvidia position approving the export of that company's most advanced chips, while flying its chief executive on Air Force One to the very country purchasing them, presented what 24/7 Wall St. described as 'the appearance of a conflict' that was 'hard to look away from.'

Warren Calls It a 'National Security Disaster'; White House Says No Conflict Exists

Senator Elizabeth Warren was among the first to publicly name the problem. 'Trump brought the Nvidia CEO on his trip to China to lobby Xi Jinping to buy advanced AI chips, even though it would create a US national security threat,' Warren wrote on X. 'It turns out Trump also bought millions in Nvidia's stock. The President's corruption is a national security disaster.' Warren also renewed her longstanding call to ban stock trading by the president, the vice president, and members of Congress, framing the Nvidia trades as evidence of the structural problem she has argued needs legislative remedy.

Eric Trump pushed back, arguing that the family's exposure to Nvidia came through broad index funds rather than a direct discretionary purchase of the company's stock. The White House issued a formal statement saying Trump's assets are 'held in a trust managed by his children' and that 'there are no conflicts of interest.' The OGE, when contacted by Benzinga, declined to address specifics, stating only that the agency is 'committed to transparency and citizen oversight of government.'

The legal framework is worth being precise about. Under the STOCK Act of 2012, the president is required to disclose individual securities transactions but is not prohibited from making them. Presidents are also explicitly exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statutes that bar other executive-branch employees from acting on matters where they hold a financial stake. No formal investigation has been announced, and no charges have been filed over the disclosed trades. The disclosures are in full compliance with current law.

Across the wider Q1 2026 filing, Trump's accounts also bought stock in Palantir, Oracle, Dell, and Intel in windows that overlapped with government decisions benefiting each company, a pattern that Moneywise documented in detail. The Nvidia trades stand out because the China chip export question sits at the intersection of national security, trade policy, and semiconductor market access, three areas where Trump holds both executive authority and, on the disclosed evidence, a direct financial interest.

What the OGE filings make impossible to ignore is a sitting president with a documented financial stake in Nvidia signing off on the regulatory decisions that determine where, and to whom, that company's most advanced products can be sold.