Bessent Faults Commerce Dept. for Failing to Blacklist Megaspeed

Detailed summary

The Treasury secretary blamed the department for not sanctioning Megaspeed and said that Nvidia employees should be held accountable if they sidestepped the law.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, blamed the Commerce Department on Friday for the government’s failure to sanction the Singaporean data center firm Megaspeed, saying that other departments had pushed for the measure but that Commerce “has the pen.”

The Treasury, Defense and State Departments and the U.S. trade representative were all in favor of putting Megaspeed on a trade blacklist called the entity list for months, but the Commerce Department is in charge of that authority, Mr. Bessent said on CNBC on Friday.

“You will have to ask them about their internal processes,” he said, adding, “Treasury and my deputy has been pushing for this for months at the deputies level.”

“The real story here should be: Did Nvidia know their client, and was there a robust effort at Nvidia to make sure that there was no leakage and that they were selling to what were obviously pass-through shell companies,” he said. “I think it’s important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that.”

Frustration is boiling over within the administration and on Capitol Hill about Megaspeed, the company led by a woman U.S. intelligence deemed to be an asset for the Chinese government.

The woman, Alice Huang, had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang. Mr. Huang resigned from his company on Thursday in the wake of revelations about that and another affair, sending the company’s stock price cratering.

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