Lutnick joins Trump's China trip after Bessent chip clash

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is flying with President Trump on Air Force One to China this week, a show of confidence that lands just days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on CNBC to accuse his own cabinet colleague of slow-walking chip export enforcement, Semafor reports.

Trump is scheduled to arrive Wednesday to meet Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the APEC summit. Lutnick's seat on the plane matters because he has been the target of a very public blame campaign over Megaspeed, a company under US investigation for smuggling advanced chips into China.

On CNBC, Bessent said Treasury "has been pushing for this for months" but Commerce "has the pen," meaning the rulemaking authority on AI chip exports sits inside Lutnick's department and Treasury's push to blacklist Megaspeed has gone nowhere. Lutnick is accused of slow-walking Commerce restrictions and leaving open loopholes that let Nvidia hardware reach Chinese customers.

The White House response was that the president "maintains complete confidence in the secretary." One source was less charitable: "This guy has nine lives...How many does he have left?"

The subplot is messier still. Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO last week after admitting an affair with an Nvidia customer suspected of being a Chinese spy, Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, alongside reports of two affairs with subordinates. A senior US official told Semafor the Nvidia situation "should not really have any bearing on the trip," adding: "These are national security matters that we develop in the administration interagency process, and we don't expect it to figure at all in any of our conversations with the Chinese while we're there."

This is one chapter in a dense run of chip-policy stories we've been tracking, including 274 Nvidia items in the last 90 days and recent reporting on a narrower Commerce chip rule sparing Cantor-linked Bitdeer that Lutnick pushed. Megaspeed remains off the blacklist as the plane leaves.