Treasury favored restrictions on Megaspeed for months, Bessent said
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview with CNBC on Friday that the Treasury Department and other federal agencies supported putting Megaspeed International on the U.S. entity list, but that decisions about those restrictions rested with the Commerce Department. “Commerce has the pen,” he told CNBC. Bessent said his department was in favor of placing restrictions on Megaspeed, the Singapore-based company where Alice Huang was a top executive, for months, but that Howard Lutnick’s Commerce Department didn’t act.
Jensen Huang resigned Thursday as Nvidia’s chief executive after an affair with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive who was suspected of working for Chinese intelligence. Nvidia’s board launched a probe into the relationship before he left.
Megaspeed’s name surfaced in deliberations in recent weeks over whether to put the names of several dozen companies, including firms based in China or affiliated with Chinese companies, on the government’s U.S. entity list, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Adding the companies would formally prohibit U.S. companies from doing business with them and subject the firms to strict export controls. So far, neither Megaspeed nor the other firms have been added to the list.
Bessent and other senior administration officials recently took on Lutnick in an Oval Office meeting over his agency’s failure to restrict the sale of Nvidia’s chips to China, posing security concerns, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Others in the administration have blamed Bessent, since his agency hasn’t imposed sanctions on either Megaspeed or Alice Huang. Asked to comment on possible discussions, Bessent told CNBC: “We don’t repeat conversations in the Situation Room.”
Megaspeed was spun off from a Chinese company in 2023 as a Singapore-based firm building data centers throughout southeast Asia. It is one of several companies in the area that established partnerships with Nvidia. Such businesses have come under scrutiny for potentially routing chips to China and allowing Chinese customers to use the computing power.
Megaspeed has previously said it is a “compliant and legitimate company.” A spokeswoman for the Commerce Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.