Bessent faults Commerce as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns

By Daniel Okafor

Nvidia’s board announced Thursday that CEO Jensen Huang had resigned, leaving Commerce under pressure to act on Singapore-based Megaspeed, an Nvidia partner at the center of a U.S. export-control scandal.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on CNBC Friday morning that it was not his fault the Trump administration had not cracked down on Megaspeed. He placed primary responsibility on the Commerce Department. “Commerce has the pen,” Bessent said. “You all will have to ask them about their internal processes.”

Why is Commerce responsible for Megaspeed?

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s department controls the entity list, which Business Insider described as a trade blacklist. The dispute is akin to a handoff: Treasury can press for action, but Commerce controls the decision to add a company.

Axios reported that Bessent confronted Lutnick during a meeting in the Situation Room over why Commerce had not added Megaspeed to the list. Bessent declined to describe what happened in the meeting. He did not deny Axios’s report.

A Commerce Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. The exchange therefore leaves open whether Commerce will move against Megaspeed, even as Treasury says the company has faced months of pressure.

What is Megaspeed under scrutiny for?

Megaspeed is a Singapore-based cloud company and Nvidia partner. Scrutiny focuses on whether its data centers helped Chinese customers obtain advanced Nvidia chips despite U.S. export restrictions.

Bessent said his department and his deputy had been “pushing for months” for action against Megaspeed. He said “there is a lot of leakage in the system.” Chinese companies, he added, were getting access to chips superior to Nvidia’s H-100.

Bessent also stated the administration’s limit for chip sales to China: “President Trump made it very clear that China should not receive any Nvidia chips above H100S, and so any leakage is very frustrating, because it hurts our great companies in the AI race and gives the Chinese an advantage.”

That policy baseline gives the dispute two tests. Commerce must decide whether to blacklist Megaspeed, while Bessent’s questions require Nvidia to address whether it prevented restricted chips from reaching Chinese customers through its partner.

Who is Alice Huang, and what did Jensen Huang acknowledge?

The New York Times reported that U.S. officials suspected Megaspeed top executive Alice Huang was a Chinese intelligence asset. The Times also reported that she had an affair with then-Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. China has repeatedly denied that Huang was a spy.

Jensen Huang apologized in a note to employees on Sunday for having an affair. His apology did not mention Alice Huang or the espionage allegations. Those silences leave the personal and corporate questions unresolved.

Bessent said news coverage had focused too heavily on the Nvidia founder’s reported affairs. His priority was the route advanced chips took into China, not the founder’s private behavior.

Why does Nvidia’s own diligence now matter?

“The story has been thus far on Jensen Huang’s personal foibles,” Bessent said. “The real story here should be, did Nvidia know their client?” He argued that accountability should follow the company’s knowledge of leakage, not merely Huang’s departure.

Bessent then pressed the corporate-control issue directly: “Was there a robust effort at Nvidia to make sure there was no leakage, and they were selling to what were obviously pass-through shell companies?” He added: “And I think it’s important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that.”

His questions move the controversy from one executive’s conduct to Nvidia’s sales diligence. They also explain why Huang’s ouster is not the end of the matter. Nvidia’s board has changed its chief executive, but the company still faces questions about what it knew about Megaspeed’s client relationships and export controls.

What remains unresolved?

The immediate decision belongs to Lutnick’s Commerce Department, which controls the entity list. Treasury has spent months pressing for action against Megaspeed, while Commerce has yet to announce a blacklist decision or explain its internal process.

Nvidia faces a separate test under scrutiny from Bessent: whether it made a robust effort to prevent leakage and whether it sold to pass-through shell companies. Until Commerce acts and Nvidia answers those questions, Huang’s resignation will be a management change rather than a resolution of the export-control scandal.