Bessent says Nvidia needs "radical changes"
Kyiv • UNN
The U.S. Treasury secretary is demanding changes in Nvidia's management amid suspicions regarding the sale of chips to China. The board of directors is expected to provide explanations.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Nvidia Corp. needs "radical personnel changes" in its leadership — including the removal of CEO Jensen Huang, UNN reports, citing Bloomberg.
On Fox News’ "Sunday Morning Futures," Bessent said that the company should look to outside candidates when searching for new leadership. His remarks came amid a series of allegations that Nvidia facilitated the sale of its advanced artificial intelligence chips to Chinese entities.
"This suggests that the board, which is searching for a new leader, should look at people outside the company," he said. "Given what has been happening internally, radical changes are needed there."
Bessent added that he wants to determine whether Nvidia deliberately ignored warning signs regarding front companies — many of them based in Singapore — through which the chips reached China. In doing so, he indicated that he wants to shift the focus from Huang’s personal "weaknesses" to questions of legal compliance and national security.
"I want to return to the issue of corporate culture at Nvidia: did they encourage these apparently illegal sales in order to artificially inflate their revenue and profits?" Bessent asked. "I think that within the next 10 days we should receive answers from the board of directors and the outside legal advisers involved."
Information about Jensen Huang’s affair with Alice Huang — a former executive of the Singapore-based company Megaspeed International, which the United States suspects of spying for China — has forced the company that dominates the high-performance AI chip market to face serious consequences.
Last week, Nvidia’s board of directors appointed Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim CEO. It is now up to her to present the company’s quarterly financial results on Tuesday.
Calling for changes in senior management, Bessent also insists on the need to bring order to the system of internal controls and regulatory compliance.
"They brought in outside lawyers, and I think we will receive an explanation of why Nvidia developed such a culture of ignoring the rules," he said on Fox News.
The Treasury secretary said that he had long advocated adding Megaspeed International to the trade "blacklist," but separately emphasized that specific steps in this direction should be taken by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. "As I have said, many other agencies insisted on this, while the Commerce Department played the leading role in preparing the documents," Bessent said on Sunday.
Lutnick’s activities, overseeing export issues and controls on microchip supplies, came under close scrutiny after Huang was removed from his position at Nvidia on Thursday. Last week, a Lutnick spokesperson told NBC News that he had agreed to testify before Congress.
Democrats also want to hear explanations from Lutnick.
"It appears that he was the obstacle in the government that prevented the flow of these Nvidia chips to China from being stopped," Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’s "Face the Nation." "And the question arises: why?"
He added: "Stopping this is the responsibility of the commerce secretary and the president."
Lawmakers are increasing pressure on Nvidia and the Trump administration, demanding more information about whether the chipmaker and the U.S. government did enough to prevent China from obtaining artificial intelligence chips.
Support is growing in Congress for a bipartisan export-control bill aimed at restricting China’s access to artificial intelligence chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment; the measure could be passed as early as in the coming weeks.
On Sunday, Bessent rejected calls—including from Democrats, who will hold a majority in Congress starting in January—to pass legislation that would codify export restrictions on chip-manufacturing technologies.
"I don’t think we need such a law," he said. "We already have all the necessary rules. We just need to ensure they are enforced."