Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday that his department and others in the Trump administration have long supported imposing restrictions on Megaspeed, the company at the center of former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s spy sex scandal.
But the Commerce Department is in charge, “and you’ll have to ask them about their internal processes,” Bessent told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The Cabinet secretary’s comments hinting at disunity within the administration followed an Axios report that Bessent, in the White House Situation Room last week, asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick why he had resisted implementing export controls, particularly on Megaspeed.
Lutnick has “repeatedly obstructed” the crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to China, Axios reported.
Commerce Department spokeswoman Kristen Eichamer told CNBC on Wednesday that Bessent and Lutnick had “no such conversation” in the situation room.
Asked on CNBC about the reported incident, Bessent said, “We don’t repeat conversations in the situation room.”
But he added that the Treasury, Defense and State departments as well as the office of the U.S. Trade Representative “have all been supportive of Megaspeed being placed on the Entity List for months.”
When asked if he was frustrated by potential export control delays, Bessent responded: “I am frustrated when President Trump made it clear that China should not receive Nvidia chips above H100. »
“Any leak is therefore very frustrating” because it “hurts our big companies in the race for AI (and) gives an advantage to the Chinese,” he said.
Huang, considered one of Trump’s closest allies before resigning as Nvidia CEO under a cloud of scandal Thursday morning, had pushed the U.S. government to ease restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips to China. In December, Trump said Nvidia could sell its powerful H200 chips to approved Chinese customers, provided the United States gets a percentage of the sales.
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