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-pageOGE 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.

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 byNOTUSandCNBC.

Seven days later, on 13 January 2026, theCommerce Department formalised a new framework authorising the sale of Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence processorsto 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.

Corruption is nothing new in US politics, but the billionaire Trump has taken it to a whole new, extreme level.Trump was forced to disclose 3,700 financial transactions conducted in 3 months, from January through March.The value of his trades was between $220 million and $750…pic.twitter.com/vhNscMK9Uq

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, Nvidiaannounced 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 under5 C.F.R. part 2634was exceeded on at least one report.

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 Huangwas 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.

Source: International Business Times UK