Wray has become the U.S. government’s most outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s spying. In an exclusive NBC News interview, he said the sheer scale of Chinese efforts to steal U.S. technology shocked him when he became FBI director in 2017.

“This one blew me away. And I’m not the kind of guy that uses words like ‘blown away’ easily,” he said.

Wray said the FBI is opening a new China related counter-intelligence investigation on average every 12 hours, with over 2,000 such cases currently underway.

“There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China does,” he said.