Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said his department was in favor of placing restrictions on Megaspeed International, the Singapore-based company where Alice Huang was a top executive, for months, but Howard Lutnick's Commerce Department didn't act.
Bessent said in an interview with CNBC Friday that the Treasury Department and other federal agencies supported putting Megaspeed on the U.S. entity list, but that decisions about those restrictions rested with the Commerce Department. "Commerce has the pen," he told CNBC.
Jensen Huang, who resigned Thursday as Nvidia's chief executive, had 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 Huang left.
Bessent and other senior administration officials recently took on Lutnick in an Oval Office meeting regarding 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, as his agency hasn't imposed sanctions on either Megaspeed or Alice Huang.
When asked to comment on possible discussions, Bessent told CNBC: "We don't repeat conversations in the Situation Room."
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, to the government's U.S. entity list, the Journal has reported.
Such a move would have formally prohibited U.S. companies from doing business with Megaspeed and the others and subjected them to strict export controls. So far, neither Megaspeed nor the other firms have been added to the list. Megaspeed has previously said it is a "compliant and legitimate company."
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.
A spokeswoman for the Commerce Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.