Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday called for a "dramatic shakeup" at Nvidia following the resignation of CEO Jensen Huang, questioning whether the chipmaker had pushed seemingly illicit sales of its advanced artificial intelligence chips to inflate its financial results.
Speaking in an interview on Fox News, Bessent said Nvidia's board should look outside the company for its next chief executive and suggested that other executives should face scrutiny over the chip giant's compliance with U.S. export controls.
"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.
Huang resigned Thursday after revelations about his relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, whom U.S. intelligence officials suspect of spying for China. Megaspeed is suspected of diverting Nvidia chips to China in violation of U.S. export controls. Nvidia has named Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim CEO.
Bessent indicated Sunday that Nvidia's problems extend well beyond its departed chief. "If this were a bank and they hadn't complied like this, the OCC would be in there right now, and a lot of the executives would be removed," he said, referring to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
He also raised questions about Nvidia's financial disclosures, pointing to a surge in revenue reported from Singapore at a time when the company's China sales were falling. Nvidia stopped separately reporting Singapore revenue in November 2025, saying a new methodology based on customers' headquarters rather than billing addresses better reflected the geographic distribution of its sales.
The remarks escalate a growing feud between Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's department over the suspected diversion of advanced AI chips to China. On Friday, Bessent told CNBC's "Squawk Box" that several federal agencies had supported adding Megaspeed to the government's export blacklist for months. "But Commerce has the pen," he said. Axios reported that Bessent confronted Lutnick in the White House Situation Room over Commerce's failure to act against Megaspeed, a confrontation Commerce denies took place.
Lutnick is separately facing scrutiny over his family's financial ties to Nvidia. CNBC reported Friday that Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm Lutnick formerly ran and which is now led by his sons, has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia's business partners. Cantor said its Nvidia share holdings fell nearly 50% over six months as national security concerns surrounding Huang escalated, and that the positions were associated with client swap transactions, not proprietary investments. There is no evidence Lutnick shared sensitive information with his sons or that Cantor traded on such information.
Bessent defended President Donald Trump's handling of the matter, saying Sunday that Trump has drawn a firm line against sales of chips more advanced than Nvidia's H200 to China. Trump authorized H200 sales to approved Chinese customers in December, following months of lobbying by Huang, under an arrangement in which the U.S. government would receive a 25% cut.
Bessent's latest criticism comes two days before Nvidia is scheduled to report its first quarterly earnings since Huang's departure.
