Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday that his department pushed for months to add the firm Megaspeed to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, but that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s agency, which controls that list, never acted on it.
Speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Bessent addressed reports of tension between him and Lutnick over why Megaspeed, which has been linked to efforts to route advanced Nvidia chips to China, was never blacklisted. Asked by CNBC’s Joe Kernen about reports of friction between the two men and whether Treasury could have acted on its own, Bessent said interagency coordination was not the problem.
“I can tell you, there was coordination. Treasury, War, USTR [U.S. Trade Representative] and State — they were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months. But Commerce has the pen — Commerce BIS has the pen. And you will have to ask them about their internal processes.”
Bessent said Treasury and the Office of Foreign Assets Control have no authority over export controls on dual-use products like advanced computer chips. “OFAC has no control over things like this, in terms of exports. This is a BIS decision, and perhaps the FTC could put something on their restricted list,” he said.
When asked by CNBC’s Becky Quick whether he was frustrated by the delay, Bessent said: “I am frustrated when President Trump made it very clear that China should not receive any NVIDIA chips above H-100s. And so any leakage is very frustrating because it hurts the our, hurts our great companies and the AI race gives the Chinese an advantage.”
Bessent was also asked about a reported November 5 confrontation with Lutnick in the White House Situation Room over why Megaspeed had not been added to the Entity List. He declined to discuss the specifics, saying, “We don’t repeat conversations in the Situation Room,” but added, “Treasury has been pushing for this for months at the deputies level.”
Bessent also pushed back on the public focus on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s personal life, saying the real issue is whether Nvidia adequately vetted its customers.
“I think there is a lot of leakage in the system and we are constantly working to close that down. And one thing here is, the story has been thus far on Jensen Huang’s personal foibles. The real story here should be: Did NVIDIA know their client, and was there a robust effort at NVIDIA to make sure that there was no leakage and that they were selling to what were obviously pass-through shell companies? And I think it’s important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that.”
The exchange puts public pressure on Commerce, which holds sole authority to add companies to the Entity List restricting access to export-controlled technology, to explain why Megaspeed was not blacklisted despite what Bessent described as months of interagency support for doing so.
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