Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday that his department, the Defense Department, the State Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative have supported adding Megaspeed to the entity list for months, and he pointed to the Commerce Department as the agency that has not acted on the restriction.
“The Commerce Department is in charge and you will have to ask them about their internal processes,” Bessent said in an interview on “Squawk Box.”
Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company, sits at the center of the controversy surrounding former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who resigned Thursday. The export-control question now before the administration is whether the company should be formally listed, a step that would curb its access to U.S.-origin technology.
Bessent’s comments suggested friction inside the administration over how aggressively to pursue suspected diversion of advanced AI chips to China. They followed reporting that Bessent, in the White House Situation Room last week, asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick why his department had resisted implementing export controls, especially on Megaspeed, and that Lutnick had “repeatedly stood in the way” of cracking down on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to China.
Commerce Department spokeswoman Kristen Eichamer said Wednesday that Bessent and Lutnick had “no such conversation” in the Situation Room. Asked about that account, Bessent declined to discuss the meeting. “We don’t repeat conversations in the Situation Room,” he said.
He did confirm that the four agencies were aligned on the listing. Treasury, Defense, State and the trade representative’s office “were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months,” Bessent said.
Asked whether he was frustrated by the delay, Bessent tied his concern to the president’s stated threshold for exports. “I am frustrated when President Trump made it very clear that China should not receive any Nvidia chips above H100s,” he said. “And so any leakage is very frustrating” because it “hurts our great companies in the AI race [and] gives the Chinese an advantage.”
In December, Trump said Nvidia could sell its powerful H200 chips to approved Chinese customers, provided the U.S. receives a percentage of the sales. The distinction between permitted sales and leakage is central to the dispute: Bessent has framed the policy as a ceiling above the H100 line, while investigators and lawmakers have focused on whether more capable parts moved through intermediaries.
Asked whether Nvidia’s highest-level processors have reached China using Megaspeed as a pass-through, Bessent did not rule it out. “I think that there is a lot of leakage in the system, and we are constantly working to close that down,” he said.
He also redirected scrutiny toward Nvidia itself. “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, 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?”
“I think it’s important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that,” he said.
Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday after admitting to an affair following scrutiny of his relationship with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive whom U.S. intelligence reportedly determined to be a Chinese spy. Huang, widely seen as one of Trump’s closest corporate allies, had pushed the U.S. government to ease restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips to China.
Congress is moving on several tracks. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said Thursday that Huang and Lutnick have both been asked to testify before the Senate Banking Committee next month. Eichamer said Friday that Lutnick “has proactively agreed to appear voluntarily before the Banking Committee to address their questions.”
Huang has separately been asked to sit for a closed-door briefing on Dec. 1 before the House committees on China, intelligence and foreign affairs. The Republican chairmen of those panels have also asked Nvidia general counsel Tim Teter to participate in a closed-door interview with them on Dec. 2.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., asked Jeff Kessler, Commerce’s under secretary for industry and security, to appear before his committee on Dec. 3 for a hearing on “chip smuggling, adversary military use of advanced AI chips, reported interference by private companies into export control policy and enforcement investigations.”
The Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment on Bessent’s remarks. The entity-list decision on Megaspeed remains with the department, and the scheduled hearings are set to press both the company’s conduct and the pace of enforcement.