Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Nvidia Corp. needs a “dramatic shakeup” in leadership after the ouster of Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang.
Speaking on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures, Bessent suggested the company should go outside the firm to find new leadership after a series of accusations that the company facilitated sales of its advanced artificial-intelligence chips to Chinese entities.
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“This makes me think that as the board conducts a search for a new leader that they need to go outside the company,” he said. “That — just what was going on inside the company — they need a dramatic shakeup.”
Bessent added that he wants to know whether Nvidia intentionally ignored warning signs of shell companies, many of them in Singapore, funneling chips to China, signaling he wants to shift the focus from Huang's personal “foibles” to the legal and national-security aspects.
“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. “And I think we need answers in the next 10 days from the the board and from the outside counsel.”
Revelations that Jensen Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International and whom the US suspects of being a Chinese spy, have forced a reckoning for the company that dominates the market for high-end AI chips.
Nvidia's board last week tapped Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress to serve as interim CEO, putting her on the spot to lead the presentation of the company's quarterly earnings on Tuesday.
Bessent paired his call for change at the top of the company with pressure to clear up its compliance oversight.
“They brought in outside counsel, and I think we are going to get an explanation on this culture of noncompliance at Nvidia,” he told Fox News.
The Treasury chief has said he long supported putting Megaspeed International on a trade blacklist, but pointedly singled out Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as the cabinet official who would have to take action.
“As I said, many other departments were pushing for this, and Commerce had the pen,” Bessent said Sunday.
Lutnick's oversight of chip exports and controls has come under increasing scrutiny since Huang was ousted from Nvidia on Thursday. A spokesperson for Lutnick told NBC News last week that he had agreed to testify before Congress.
Democrats are eager to hear from Lutnick as well.
“It looks like he has been the barrier inside the government to stopping the flow of these Nvidia chips to China,” Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence panel, said on CBS's Face the Nation, “And the question is why?”
He added, “It is the Commerce secretary's job and the president's job to stop that from happening.”
Lawmakers are increasing pressure on Nvidia and the Trump administration to provide more information about whether the chipmaker and the US government have done enough to prevent China from acquiring AI chips.
Congress is rallying behind bipartisan export-control legislation that would curtail China's access to AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which may win passage within weeks.
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Bessent on Sunday rejected calls, including by Democrats who will hold the majority in Congress come January, for legislation to lock in export restrictions on chip technology.
“I don't think we need the legislation,” he said. “We have all the rules we need. We just need them enforced.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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