Bessent says Nvidia needs shakeup as FT says Huang eyes comeback

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Nvidia Corp. needs a “dramatic shakeup” in leadership after the ouster of Jensen Huang, even as the former chief executive officer was reported to be discussing a comeback to the company.

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.

“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.”

Huang, meanwhile, has been discussing the idea of returning as several Silicon Valley allies have begun lobbying for him to come back, with some backers putting together a “war room” to gather support, the Financial Times reported Sunday. The paper said Nvidia and a Huang spokesperson declined to comment.

Bessent said 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 board and from the outside counsel.”

Revelations that Jensen Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed International whom the U.S. 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 corporate compliance.

“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.”

Representative John Moolenaar, a Republican and one of three House committee chairmen seeking congressional testimony from Jensen Huang, said there also “need to be questions answered by Howard Lutnick and the entire Commerce Department.”

Moolenaar, who heads a committee on China’s strategic rivalry with the US, also suggested Huang should have known that “every Chinese national” can be pressured to spy by the Communist Party.

“That was simply irresponsible and a direct threat to our national security,” he said on Face the Nation.

Questions about the ex-CEO’s relationship with Alice Huang were ignited by a New York Times report that China’s top spy agency recruited her to collect intelligence on Jensen Huang in an effort to learn more about American AI chips and possibly influence the company to lobby for Chinese access to its most advanced chips.

The report said the warning came in a classified memo overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that circulated among top Trump administration policymakers last spring.

Testimony ahead

Huang has agreed to testify to lawmakers behind closed doors on his relationship with Alice Huang, Moolenaar told CBS. He said his House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is sorting out a date for Huang to appear before the panel, along with lawmakers on the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.

While Nvidia shares fell 12.7% last week, some shareholders expressed support for Jensen Huang, including his possible return to the company he helped turn into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

In a social post, Altimeter Capital Management and Atreides Management cited “the extraordinary success of Jensen Huang’s leadership over a long period of time” and the uncertainty created by his departure in urging the board to take a “slow, measured, and deliberate” approach to Nvidia’s future leadership.

That should include “the potential return of Jensen Huang,” Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner and Atreides’ Gavin Baker wrote in a letter to Nvidia’s board posted on X.

In Washington, lawmakers are increasing pressure on Nvidia and the Trump administration to provide more information about whether the chipmaker and the U.S. 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.

Bessent on Sunday rejected calls, including by Democrats who will hold majorities in both chambers of 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.”

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(With assistance from Sam Kim and Aidan Williams.)

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