Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says if Nvidia was a bank, ‘a lot of the executives would be removed’ — while Huang reportedly eyes return

Detailed summary

After blaming Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for not blacklisting a company suspected of funneling AI chips to China, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put Nvidia on blast.

After blaming Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for not blacklisting a company suspected of funneling AI chips to China, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put Nvidia on blast.

The Treasury Department and other federal agencies were in favor of placing trade restrictions on Megaspeed, the cloud computing company at the center of Jensen Huang’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

“Treasury, War, USTR, and State were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months,” Bessent told CNBC on Friday. “But Commerce has the pen.”

To help preserve the U.S. lead over China in the AI race, the Trump administration has blocked exports of certain high-end chips, including Nvidia’s, while allowing lesser models.

In an interview on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, he was asked why Megaspeed wasn’t blacklisted. The Singapore-based company and its Malaysian subsidiary shipped at least $7.5 billion in Nvidia chips to China over two years, The Information reported.

Bessent pivoted away from the Commerce Department’s role and replied that what’s more important is “whether Nvidia had a culture of compliance around the U.S. export restrictions.”

He added that he also wants to know if compliance failures originated at a low level, somewhere in the middle, or up in the C-suite.

“These shell companies were obvious. They were being investigated, and did Nvidia use them as a workaround to sell chips to the Chinese?” Bessent asked. “And I think we’re going to see answers. There’s a strong independent lead director. They brought in outside counsel, and I think we’re going to get an explanation on this culture of non-compliance at Nvidia.”

On Thursday, Nvidia announced that Huang had stepped down as CEO. The company also named CFO Colette Kress as the interim CEO during the search for a replacement and appointed Harvey Jones as Nvidia’s first-ever board chair.

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