Bessent Points to Commerce Department Delays as AI Chip Leakage to China Grows

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he was “frustrated” by the slow pace of placing the firm on the export control list and by reports that advanced AI chips were making their way into China.

“President Trump made it very clear that China should not receive any Nvidia chips above H100s, so any leakage is very frustrating because it hurts our great companies in the AI race, because it gives the Chinese an advantage,” he said.

According to the New York Times, the Commerce Department spent last year probing Megaspeed over suspicions that it had been smuggling some of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips into China. Megaspeed has been contacted for comment.

Although there was mounting pressure on the department to add the company to the restricted list, separate reporting in the Financial Times indicated that officials were dragging their feet on efforts to designate the cloud computing firm.

Bessent, however, also directed criticism toward Nvidia itself.

“The story has been thus far of Jensen Huang’s personal foibles,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box programme, external.

“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?

“It’s important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that.”

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