Scott Bessent blames Commerce Department over Megaspeed

Nov 14 · Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns Updated 14:09

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday following revelations about an affair with Alice Huang and another affair; Huang apologized for the affair with Alice Huang. Nvidia's stock price dropped following the resignation. Alice Huang leads Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data center and cloud company that U.S. intelligence considers a Chinese government asset. Megaspeed has denied illicitly shipping chips to China and claims compliance with U.S. laws. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent questioned whether Nvidia employees should be held accountable for potentially selling to shell companies and stated in a CNBC interview that chip leakage to China contradicts President Trump's directives and harms US competitiveness in AI. Bessent confronted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in the Situation Room regarding Megaspeed's exclusion from the trade blacklist. Lutnick is facing scrutiny for his close relationship with Jensen Huang and for allegedly resisting stricter chip limits. Both Lutnick and Huang have been summoned to testify before the Senate Banking Committee. Democratic lawmakers Richard E. Neal and Ron Wyden are investigating a tariff-based import process they claim allowed advanced H200 chips to reach China, and they argue that President Trump's use of the Trade Act undermined national security.

The resignation of Jensen Huang and the revelation of his affair with Alice Huang shift the dispute from a bureaucratic delay to a potential conflict of interest. PBS highlights the scrutiny facing Howard Lutnick due to his close relationship with the former Nvidia CEO, suggesting the Commerce Department's inaction may have been personal rather than procedural.

BBC provides the most critical insight by connecting the administrative failure to a specific legal mechanism. It reports that Democratic lawmakers are investigating how a tariff-based import process under the Trade Act allowed H200 chips to reach China, addressing the technical gap identified in the first analysis.

Business Insider and New York Times focus on the accountability of Nvidia employees and the use of shell companies. This moves the focus toward corporate negligence, though they largely mirror the narrative of the personal scandal without probing the regulatory loopholes.

Readers should now watch the Senate Banking Committee testimony. The core question is no longer just why the blacklist was delayed, but whether personal ties between the Commerce Secretary and Nvidia's leadership actively blocked national security measures.