Bessent Demands Outside Nvidia CEO, 10-Day Answer on China Sales
TL;DR
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Nvidia should 'go outside the company' to replace Jensen Huang, who resigned Nov. 12 after a 33-year run.
- Bessent gave Nvidia's board and outside counsel 10 days to answer questions about 'seemingly illicit' chip sales routed through Singapore shell companies.
- Bessent again blamed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's department for stalling the trade-blacklist listing of Megaspeed, the Singapore firm at the scandal's center.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called for a "dramatic shakeup" at Nvidia, telling the chipmaker's board to hire its next CEO from outside the company and to answer within 10 days whether it pursued "seemingly illicit" chip sales to China to goose revenue, Bloomberg reported.
The intervention lands days after Jensen Huang resigned on Nov. 12, ending a 33-year run. Colette Kress is serving as interim CEO. Nvidia's board has already sounded out Arm chief executive Rene Haas, who spent seven years at Nvidia as vice president and general manager of its computing products business before joining Arm in 2013.
"I want to keep coming back to what was the culture at Nvidia, and were they pressing these seemingly illicit sales to goose their revenues and their earnings?" Bessent said. He pressed on whether Nvidia ignored warning signs around shell companies, many of them in Singapore, and asked whether the company used them "as a workaround to sell chips to the Chinese." The board has retained outside counsel; both the directors and that counsel are on the 10-day clock, which runs to roughly Nov. 25.
Bessent also renewed his public attack on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, saying Treasury, the Defense Department, the U.S. Trade Representative's office and the State Department had backed adding Megaspeed, the Singapore firm at the center of the scandal, to Washington's trade blacklist "for months," only to be blocked at Commerce. Megaspeed's CEO, Alice Huang, has reportedly been linked personally to Jensen Huang. The rebuke echoes earlier reporting that Bessent confronted Lutnick directly in the Situation Room last week.
Treasury's demand is our third Nvidia-China story today, alongside the WSJ account of Huang personally building the Asia route and a separate NYT scoop on Lutnick narrowing an export rule to spare a Tencent customer.
Asked about the focus on Huang's private life, Bessent pushed back: "The story thus far has been on Jensen Huang's personal foibles."
Originally reported by bloomberg.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Bessent Gives Nvidia 10 Days to Answer on 'Illicit' China Sales, Demands Outside CEO After Huang Ouster