US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has blamed the Commerce Department, run by Howard Lutnick, of failing to properly oversee the export of high-specification Nvidia chips, as the fallout from the scandal widens.
Jensen Huang left the company he co-founded after revelations he had an affair a former Megaspeed executive. The firm had been buying advanced chips from Nvidia.
Megaspeed had been probed by US government agencies over suspicions it had been smuggling those chips into China, reports said, but it is not on a list of firms that US companies are prevented from working with.
Bessent told CNBC several government agencies “were in favour of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months”.
“But Commerce has the pen… and you will have to ask them about their internal process,” he added.
Bessent also said he was “frustrated” by delays in putting the company on the export control list and reports of leakage of AI chips into China.
“President Trump made it very clear that China should not receive any Nvidia chips above H100s, so any leakage is very frustrating because it hurts our great companies in the AI race, because it gives the Chinese an advantage,” he said.
Last year, the Commerce Department had been investigating Megaspeed over suspicions it had been smuggling some of Nvidia’s advanced AI chips into China, according to the New York Times.
There was also pressure on the Commerce Department to add it to the list, but separate reporting in the Financial Times said the department was delaying efforts to have the cloud computing firm included.
However, Bessent also pointed the finger at Nvidia.
“The story has been thus far of Jensen Huang’s personal foibles,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box programme, external.
“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?
“It’s important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that.”
Megaspeed has been contacted for comment.
