Armwood Technology Blog

I’ve reviewed almost every Android foldable this year — here’s how the iPhone Duo compares

2026-11-06T20:38:11.988-05:00

I’ve reviewed almost every Android foldable this year — here’s how the iPhone Duo compares

"Apple’s first foldable matches its Android rivals in a few key areas, but it falls short in others.

Nov 6, 2026 at 7:30 AM EST

When I first read Allison and Nilay’s Verge review of the iPhone Duo, I was immediately struck by one of their complaints: that the cover display is too small. That’s not how the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 feels, I thought. Had they got it wrong?

After a week and a half using the Duo, I know exactly what they mean — and it’s not the screen’s fault at all. Apps that feel comfortable on Samsung’s short foldable and the similarly sized Xiaomi 18 Fold are often cramped and compact on the Duo’s cover screen, robbed of screen space by a right-hand rail that most apps don’t make use of anyway.

That’s just one of the ways that Apple’s first foldable feels fundamentally different from the Android alternatives. I’ve reviewed almost every Android foldable that was released this year, from Samsung and Google to Honor and Oppo, and I’ve been surprised to realize that the Duo holds its own against them all on hardware, but is let down by iOS itself. For now at least, Android is slicker for folding phones — though I don’t know how long that will last.

Size, shape, and build quality

The iPhone Duo feels great. Mostly. Its curved frame and Ceramic Shield back have that ineffable Apple feeling, a sense of polish that helps justify the $2,000 price tag. The hinge in particular is satisfyingly smooth, closing and opening with a comforting magnetic click. Compared with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 or Xiaomi 18 Fold, the Duo just feels better.

But part of that is down to the Duo’s big drawback: its weight. At first it feels encouraging, the reassuring heft of all that glass and metal. Then I started using the phone, and I realized it’s just plain heavy. It weighs more than all of its rivals — even ones with larger screens — and any attempt to use the Duo one-handed makes that obvious quickly. It’s a little thicker than some other foldables, too, though in practice that bothers me far less.

Honor’s Magic V6 (right) is the thinnest foldable around, but not by enough to really matter.

The squat shape won’t be for everyone. The Duo is even shorter and wider than the Z Fold 8, though almost identical in dimensions to Xiaomi’s 18 Fold. I’m a fan of this design, which is both cute and comfortable when folded shut and gives you a natural choice of portrait or landscape orientations when open. The major downsides are that the short cover screen makes some apps awkward to use, and it’s wide when you need to stretch across to the other side — a problem worsened by some of Apple’s software choices. More on that later.

And while the Duo’s IP68 rating is an obvious advantage over much of the competition (only Google and Honor can match it), we’ve not seen many recent Android foldables struggle with hinge and display damage quite like the Duo. It’s still not clear how widespread Duo screen failures really are — they don’t seem to be as ubiquitous as Samsung’s first-generation failures back in 2019 — but non-impact damage like this is almost unheard of in modern Android foldables. It’s a reminder that the Duo is still a first-gen product while some Android rivals are into their eighth iteration.

The screen is the Duo’s smartest hardware trick, and easily my favorite thing about the phone compared with other foldable phones. No rival offers anything like the “nano-texture” (read: matte) finish on the inner screen, which is easy on the eyes in more ways than one.

The Duo’s crease (right) is about as hard to spot as the Oppo Find N6’s.

Crucially, it also helps mask the phone’s crease, which isn’t quite invisible but is well-hidden. The Duo’s crease is somewhere in the middle of the Android pack: subtler than Google’s and Honor’s, more obvious than Samsung’s. Oppo’s near-invisible creaseremains the best, but not by much. The Duo’s matte screen means it’s harder than most to see (though visible from an angle), but it’s still easy enough to feel, and a couple of friends have immediately remarked on it when trying the phone. Still, I don’t want to over-egg it: The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is probably the only one out of this year’s foldables with a crease I’d say is a problem. The Duo’s crease is easy to ignore.

I’d actually say the Duo’s under-display camera is more of an annoyance. It’s not only inside an extra-pixelated circle of screen, but that’s the only patch without the matte coating, which makes it a little more distracting. I can mostly tune it out, but not entirely. I’d probably prefer a regular selfie camera tucked right into the corner, as on the Xiaomi 18 Fold and a few others, but I suspect opinions will differ here.

Finally, the Duo benefits from stylus support, letting you use a USB-C Apple Pencil on the central screen. This isn’t unique — Samsung used to offer the same, and both of Honor’s and Oppo’s latest foldables work with their styli — but plenty of the current Android crop don’t offer the option. I don’t have an Apple Pencil, so I haven’t been able to test it myself, but my colleague Allison is clearly a fan.

Despite being the same size, Xiaomi’s 18 Fold (right) fits in a triple rear camera.

The iPhone Duo’s cameras, like those on most foldables, are fairly basic, with a pair of 48-megapixel rear lenses, one main and one ultrawide. It’s a setup comparable to the Z Fold 8, and both phones’ cameras are good, but not great. Most other Android foldables (including Samsung’s Z Fold 8 Ultra) instead offer triple rear cameras, netting you a big boost in photographic flexibility. They often use larger sensors than either Apple or Samsung, so their main cameras are better, too. Still, Vivo is the only manufacturer getting close to slab flagship quality in its foldable cameras, and its hardware lags behind in a few other respects that would prevent it from being my foldable recommendation overall.

As for selfies, the front-screen camera is pretty basic, but you can take better shots using the rear cameras by opening the phone up and flipping it round. That under-display camera is worse than a regular selfie camera, but good enough so long as you only use it for video calls.

As for battery, Nilay and Allison had different experiences in our Duo review. I’ve mostly found the battery long-lasting, easily running a full day of mixed use. It’s got a higher capacity than either of Samsung’s foldables, so that’s no real surprise. It still pales in comparison to the two-day battery of Honor’s Magic V6, but once you’re past lasting a day, I think you get diminishing returns anyway.

Software support and multitasking

On hardware alone, the Duo holds its own.

So far, the Duo looks like a competitive foldable, albeit a little middle-of-the-pack. It beats its rivals in some hardware areas, falls behind in others, and has one truly unique selling point in the matte foldable display.

Unusually for Apple, the software is what lets it down.

The biggest problem isn’t Apple’s own software, but everyone else’s: Most apps still aren’t optimized for the Duo. In the best case, that means apps that don’t make full use of the Duo’s new right-hand rail, showing an empty black bar instead of app controls. Worse are the ones that don’t even scale to the larger screen — apps like Bluesky or Duolingo can use the whole display on other foldables, but appear in thin strips with huge black bars on the Duo.

This will improve with time. I’ve seen Google Maps, Google Translate, and Instagram update in the last few days alone, and no doubt more will follow. Some are already better on the Duo: Slack uses a helpful desktop-style two-column layout, while on Android foldables you just get the mobile UI but bigger. But for now at least, most apps run better on my Android foldables than on my Duo.

The Xiaomi 18 Fold (right) makes full use of its cover screen, though different app scaling can affect how useful that is.

OS-level improvements are harder to predict. At first I loved the idea of Apple moving key controls to the right-hand edge, but it takes up so much space that it leaves the Duo’s cover screen feeling smaller than it needs to: You get all the awkward stretching of a wide phone without the expansive screen space. Samsung and Xiaomi’s wide foldables may be about the same size, but in use they feel much bigger. I wonder how many software developers will follow Google’s lead in app optimization — it essentially ignored the right rail entirely while updating Google Maps, instead just spreading the map to the edge of the screen. It feels bigger and better than most other Duo apps as a result.

And this is partly the Android user in me, but the lack of a persistent back-swipe gesture seems to grate more on the Duo than on other iPhones. Sometimes, moving backward in an app requires a button in the right rail, sometimes one in the top-left corner, sometimes a swipe from the left-hand edge of the screen. It’s annoyingly inconsistent, and more often than not requires stretching across the phone’s width, whether it’s open or closed. Being able to swipe back from either side of the screen gives Android foldables a huge advantage in one-handed use.

Xiaomi’s 18 Fold (right) has substantially more flexible multitasking than the Duo.

As for multitasking, the Duo is well behind the competition. You can run two apps at once in split-screen, but only in landscape mode, and each must take up exactly half the display. Compare this to Oppo, which allows you to fluidly move between multiple split-screen apps and floating windows; or Xiaomi, which allows up to six apps to run side by side in split-screen, and Apple’s implementation feels downright basic. These are the extreme end of Android, and probably overkill for most (they certainly are for me), but I’d take them over Apple’s half-hearted multitasking any day.

Apple hasn’t waded into the foldable market and fixed all its flaws. If anything, “crackgate” is proof that it’s still playing catch-up with the Android alternatives, which have a few years of fine-tuning behind them. Many are still lighter, and thinner, and have subtler creases than the Duo, or bigger batteries and better cameras. In broad strokes, though, this hardware is up to scratch — and, crucially, on par with its most direct worldwide rival, the Galaxy Z Fold 8.

For now, though, Android has the software edge. Google has worked hard to make its OS adaptable to various screen sizes so most apps take full advantage of the bigger inner screen while individual OEMs have designed ambitious multitasking tools. That isn’t yet true for iOS, and some of Apple’s own software tweaks in the OS make things more awkward still. It’s those that I’m worried about long term. The best thing about foldables is their flexibility — something Apple itself often lacks. If the Duo is going to catch up to Android, Apple might have to adapt.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge"

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Amazon Kindle Colorsoft Review: The Single-Task Gadget of Our Times

2026-11-06T06:01:25.335-05:00

Amazon Kindle Colorsoft Review: The Single-Task Gadget of Our Times

Summary

“The $290 Kindle Colorsoft adds color and a story recap feature to a single-task device amid rising e-reader demand. Battery life drops to eight weeks, but color enhances reading despite higher cost and muted comics.

E-book reader sales are soaring as consumers seek technology offering respite from social media and artificial intelligence hype. It’s even better in color.

Nov. 5, 2026

Last year, sales of Kindles were the highest in over a decade.Video by Manuel Orbegozo For The New York Times

By Brian X. Chen

Brian X. Chen is The Times’s lead consumer technology writer and the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.

Like all Kindles released in the last 18 years, Amazon’s new $290 Kindle does just one thing well: read digital books. This one, called Colorsoft, also shows color.

It may not sound like terribly exciting technology. But I couldn’t resist trying one.

That’s because e-book readers are suddenly trending. Amid the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and discourse about smartphone addiction, e-readers are flying off the shelves. Last year, sales of Kindles were the highest in over a decade. People seem to be looking for a respite from the noisy chatbots and brain-rotting social media memes polluting the web.

The popularity of the Kindle is also part of a quiet resurgence happening with our personal tech. Lots of consumers, especially young people who grew up with smartphones, are turning to minimalist tech like wired earbuds, retro music players and “dumbphones” without traditional screens. A lack of features has become a feature in itself, and the Kindle is a rare example of an old-school technology that continues to be upgraded with modern features.

I tested the Kindle Colorsoft for about a week and found it to be a worthwhile upgrade from a black-and-white e-reader. There are downsides to adding color — the battery life is shorter, for one. But the addition of color enhances the reading experience, especially for comics and books that include photography.

The Colorsoft also includes a tiny bit of A.I. software that provides story recaps, but it’s thoughtfully designed and simple to ignore if you want to stay focused on reading.

Here’s what you need to know.

Pros and Cons

The new Kindle Colorsoft, which starts at $290, includes color. A $320 version comes with an aluminum case instead of plastic.Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

Amazon’s Kindles and the vast majority of e-book readers on the market have relied on E ink technology that showed text in grayscale. Amazon introduced color to its e-reader in 2024 with the first Colorsoft. This year’s Colorsoft is slightly thinner and lighter than the original, which is a win for commuters.

Battery life is a noticeable drawback. Amazon estimates the Colorsoft will last eight weeks compared with 12 weeks on its $200 black-and-white e-reader, the Kindle Paperwhite. That’s still plenty of juice, but because my reading sessions tend to be a few hours a day, I needed to plug in the Colorsoft after about five days; with past Kindles I’d typically recharge every two weeks.

Reading text on a Colorsoft is easier on the eyes than with a bright touch-screen tablet such as an iPad. Text looks clearer — this e-reader shows text at about double the resolution than Kindles from many years ago. There’s also the option to adjust the color temperature of the screen based on the time of day, like a warmer, orange hue for late-night reading.

I have done most of my reading on a black-and-white Kindle for years, and I didn’t realize what a difference color would make. All e-books previously purchased on Amazon can be transferred to the Colorsoft and shown in color whenever applicable. I feel like I have more of a personal connection with my library of e-books now that the covers are shown in their intended colors. For a cookbook I regularly consult for bread recipes, it was helpful to see a color photograph of the crust to determine whether I had underbaked a loaf.

When it comes to reading media with more vibrant colors, such as comic books, don’t expect the Colorsoft to be on a par with an iPad mini. The Colorsoft’s screen has a slight blue tinge, and its color range is limited. As a result, comics in color look more muted and less vibrant than on an iPad, but it beats reading them on a black-and-white Kindle. If your want to read a lot of comics, an iPad may be a better fit, though a tablet may lure you toward social media distractions.

Comics in color look more muted and less vibrant than on an iPad, but it beats reading them on a black-and-white Kindle.Video by Manuel Orbegozo For The New York Times

With the internet now flooded with A.I. slop, the Kindle benefits from including the bare minimum of A.I. applied in a useful way. If you have to put a book down and return to it days or weeks later, you can press a button labeled “Story So Far” to get a spoiler-free refresher on what has happened up to the point where you left off. As a sleep-deprived parent of a fussy toddler, I found myself using that tool quite often.

Bottom Line

The biggest drawback of the Colorsoft is the price. At $290 — a $40 increase from last year’s Colorsoft — this device is expensive for just reading books. The version I tested, the Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition, comes in an aluminum case and costs $320. But with a global memory shortage driving up the cost of most consumer electronics, paying a hefty price for nice tech is becoming a new normal.

Prices might come back down eventually, but until then, we can at least appreciate that a single-tasker like the Kindle not only continues to exist but keeps getting better.

Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use.“

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Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot

2026-10-29T08:24:31.983-04:00

Nvidia Chief Seen as Target of Chinese Spy Plot

Summary

“Surveillance identified Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, as a Chinese intelligence asset linked to Jensen Huang; Trump was briefed and took no action. Nvidia denies risk, while Megaspeed investigates.

A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen Huang was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action.

Oct. 29, 2026

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is influential at the White House on technology policy and has developed a close relationship with President Trump.Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence.

A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia A.I. chips to China. And now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset, funneling information to Beijing.

But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang or Huang Le, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive.

For years, Washington has worked to deny China the technology needed to match or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in artificial intelligence. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s, set off alarms at the White House.

Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.

This account is based on interviews with people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence, as well as other officials and industry executives and analysts.

American officials already suspected that Ms. Huang was helping China evade constraints on its ability to gain access to advanced A.I. chips.

But the revelation that she was feeding information directly to Beijing raised more troubling possibilities, including that Mr. Huang had insights into Mr. Trump’s thinking on an issue of vital importance to both nations, one likely to come up when the president visits China next month. And it left questions about whether she could be gleaning information about Nvidia, which as much as any company accounts for the lead the United States has maintained in developing cutting-edge A.I. models.

Mr. Huang attended a luncheon at the White House with other tech industry leaders last month.Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services, people briefed on the surveillance said.

The surveillance of Ms. Huang continues, they said, and companies that have been affiliated with her continued this year to purchase Nvidia chips.

Nvidia said the company that employed Ms. Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer and that it had previously investigated and debunked claims the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said: “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”

Nvidia is “confident that if the U.S. government believes that any person is a threat to American industry, it would let us know,” Mr. Rizzo said. Customers like Megaspeed, he added, “receive ordinary business information — not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets — and zero information relevant to national security.”

The White House, the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency all declined to comment. In a statement to The New York Times, Megaspeed said that its “current leadership” takes the matter “extremely seriously and is committed to getting to the facts behind these allegations.” It added that “outside counsel has been retained to conduct a thorough internal investigation and has notified the U.S. government that we are fully committed to cooperating.”

Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump.

Ms. Huang did not respond to requests for comment. It is not clear how closely she is still connected to Megaspeed. A person familiar with Megaspeed’s operations said that Ms. Huang had become less active in the company in the wake of the American investigations.

Asked about the American conclusion that Ms. Huang has been collecting intelligence on behalf of Beijing, Liu Chang, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said the United States was pursuing a campaign of “groundless smears and slanders” against China.

When Mr. Trump was initially briefed on the intelligence last year, U.S. officials did not believe the Nvidia executive knew that Ms. Huang was gathering information for the Chinese. It is unclear whether intelligence officials have since updated their assessment, but some senior officials inside the Trump administration doubt that Mr. Huang could have remained unaware of what they had concluded was her intelligence-gathering role for China.

Questions about whether Megaspeed was providing A.I. chips to China became public through articles published last year by The New York Timesand Bloomberg News.

Mr. Huang has successfully lobbied the administration during Mr. Trump’s second term to loosen regulations on artificial intelligence companies and roll back tighter restrictions on the sales of Nvidia’s chips to China. He also negotiated a deal with Mr. Trump that allowed the U.S. government to take a 25 percent stake of certain Nvidia chips that the government allows to be sold to China.

The close relationship between the president and Mr. Huang has impeded efforts to clamp down on Nvidia’s chip sales abroad, current and former U.S. officials said. They described some investigations and proposed trade sanctions involving China or Nvidia as having ground to a halt within the Commerce Department, the agency in charge of regulating chip exports.

Nvidia has said that it complies with the law and that there is no evidence of its chips being smuggled to China. Mr. Rizzo said China’s government has “blocked U.S. AI chips, protecting its own industry.”

Many questions about the situation remain unanswered, at least publicly.

It is unclear whether concerns about protecting the surveillance played a role in the decision not to inform Mr. Huang. Telling him could have alerted Ms. Huang that she was being watched, which is a common reason intelligence officials hesitate to give defensive briefings.

It could not be determined which intelligence agency or agencies have been involved in monitoring Ms. Huang, or what prompted them to start. It is also not clear under what circumstances Ms. Huang began gathering information for Beijing, what information she passed along or its value to China.

The previous reporting about Ms. Huang by The Times described her meteoric and somewhat mysterious rise. A Chinese businesswoman and investor, she eventually became a top official with Megaspeed, which the Commerce Department, toward the end of the Biden administration, began to suspect was helping China evade U.S. prohibitions and gain access to the computing power of Nvidia chips.

The U.S. government has been investigating Megaspeed since late 2024, when a Commerce Department official visited its data center in Malaysia and found the site to be suspicious. The Nvidia equipment was still packed in boxes, suggesting it was being shipped in or out rather than installed there.

Singapore has conducted its own investigation into Megaspeed. In 2025, Singaporean authorities brought Ms. Huang in for questioning, but subsequently released her.

The Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed was handed over this year to the Justice Department, administration officials said.

While the U.S. government has restricted companies from exporting the most advanced Nvidia chips into China since 2022, some firms have been found to illegally smuggle them over the Chinese border. Other companies have legally set up businesses that buy large numbers of chips to build data centers in Southeast Asia that serve Chinese firms.

Some U.S. officials and lawmakers consider this to be a problematic loophole, and the Biden administration restricted this practice. Mr. Trump rolled back those rules. The administration is weighing whether to tighten them again.

Megaspeed is among the firms in Southeast Asia that buy chips to build data centers and then rent their computing power to companies in China.

Megaspeed is essentially a middle man. It has bought Nvidia chips from the American arm of Inspur, a Chinese server maker. The U.S. has blacklisted Inspur’s parent company for funneling technology to the Chinese military, though the U.S. firm remains free of sanctions.

Megaspeed has then provided that computing power to Alibaba and other Chinese companies. U.S. officials believe the firm is one piece of a sprawling international effort by Chinese companies to access the chips needed to build and run A.I. Investigators suspect that some Nvidia chips acquired by Megaspeed are also finding their way illegally into China.

Megaspeed’s sister company in Malaysia bought at least $4.8 billion worth of advanced A.I. equipment containing Nvidia chips and technology between June 2024 and February 2026, according to trade records obtained from ImportGenius, a trade platform. It was an exceptional amount of money for a small, obscure company.

Nvidia and Megaspeed have continued to do business this year. The limited data available for most of this year shows that Megaspeed and its affiliates kept buying Nvidia products, often through intermediaries.

To prevent chips from being smuggled to China, Nvidia evaluates buyers before approving a chip purchase and sometimes checks later whether the buyer still has the chips. The company continues to list Megaspeed on its website as a cloud partner. Megaspeed advertised the relationship as recently as this month. In a job ad, Megaspeed’s Indonesian branch called itself “a premier business partner of Nvidia.”

Megaspeed has continued serving its primary client, Alibaba, according to that person and other tech industry analysts.

In June 2024, just weeks before Megaspeed began its purchases, photos posted to LinkedIn showed Mr. Huang alongside Ms. Huang at a bar in Taipei following a local technology trade show. They drank whiskey with other A.I. executives.

One year later, in May 2025, they were seen together again, leaving a restaurant in Taipei after a business dinner with other A.I. suppliers. She waited behind Mr. Huang as he spoke to Taiwanese journalists outside the restaurant.

Those details were described in a Times article last October. But the deeper intelligence involving Ms. Huang remained closely held inside the administration.

People with knowledge of the matter said U.S. agencies had been conducting electronic surveillance of Ms. Huang. That surveillance showed that she was in contact with an American citizen.

U.S. intelligence agencies generally cannot legally surveil American citizens without a court order. But when communications involving Americans turn up in surveillance, citizens can be identified to government agencies who can show a need for the information through a process known as unmasking. In this case, the unmasking process identified Mr. Huang as the U.S. citizen.

Before 2025, Mr. Huang seldom visited Washington and stayed out of politics.

But as the Trump administration was considering a ban on sales of Nvidia chips to China, Mr. Huang and his wife traveled to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private club and residence in Florida, to meet with Mr. Trump at a high-end donors’ dinner and sell him on the idea of allowing chip companies to do business with Beijing.

At the event, according to people briefed on the discussion there, the Nvidia executive appeared to wow the president with his descriptions of his own rise.

Nvidia later donated at least $20 million to Mr. Trump’s ballroom fund, a person with knowledge of the matter said. The company also pledged to invest $500 billion on manufacturing in the United States.

And when the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, visited the White House for a state dinner last month, Mr. Huang was at the head table.

Last year, Mr. Trump approved the sale of an older generation of Nvidia chips to China in return for a cut of the revenue. As the president sought warmer ties with China ahead of his meeting with Mr. Xi, he entertained a push by Mr. Huang to sell the Chinese even more powerful technology, rankling some administration officials and Republicans in Congress, before ultimately deciding against it.

People who have watched the two men interact say Mr. Trump has been won over by the lavish praise Mr. Huang has given the president in public, and his immense wealth and success.

It is not clear when Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang of Megaspeed first met. Before The Times reported last year on her role in purchasing Nvidia chips, Ms. Huang posted photos of herself with Mr. Huang on her social media feed, according to a person who viewed it.

Ms. Huang has a slim profile on the Chinese internet. She has described herself as Megaspeed’s chief executive, and the company listed her as its managing director for its first eight months before removing her from that role in its corporate paperwork. Megaspeed’s current director is from Singapore but has recently lived in Shanghai, according to business records and his social media accounts.

According to information posted online by a Chinese investment fund where Ms. Huang worked, she was formerly employed in China as a TV reporter, but The Times could not find any information to verify that. She later worked at several major Chinese banks, then joined a Shanghai-based fund, Hexi Capital, which has invested in a variety of semiconductor- and A.I.-related firms, according to WireScreen, a data platform.

According to tech investors familiar with the company, Ms. Huang and her associates bragged about her connections to Mr. Huang and used it to raise funds and promote their fast-expanding network of businesses, which has invested alongside the Chinese government in data centers around China. In Southeast Asia, Megaspeed has continued to pitch new data centers, hire employees and trumpet its close connections to Nvidia, according to industry analysts, online job posts and other records.

Megaspeed is pushing ahead with construction of a large data center in Johor, the Malaysian state across the border from Singapore, where new A.I. facilities have risen between palm oil plantations. In a stock filing last month, a Malaysian property developer said it had received the final payment for the 53-acre plot where a Megaspeed subsidiary has promised to build the data center.

When a Times journalist visited recently, rows of construction materials sat between the skeletal frames of partially built data centers. Outside the park, backhoe loaders dug into the reddish brown earth as workers installed concrete pipes.

The company had already secured the chips necessary for the build out, according to a person with knowledge of the plans.

Pei-Lin Wu and Zunaira Saieed contributed reporting.

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul.

Tripp Mickle reports for The Times on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about tech industry trends like layoffs and artificial intelligence.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.“

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