Bessent Tells Nvidia to Hire Outside CEO, Gives Board 10 Days on China Chip Sales

Speaking on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures", Bessent said Nvidia needed "a dramatic shakeup" after the departure of co-founder Jensen Huang, who resigned as president, chief executive and director on November 12. He said the board "need to go outside the company" to find a successor, and that "we need answers in the next 10 days" from the board and from its outside counsel.

The remarks bring the Treasury's top official directly into a succession process that Nvidia's board is running under pressure from investors, employees and lawmakers. A Treasury Secretary has no formal say over who runs a listed company, but Nvidia's processors sit at the centre of US export controls on advanced AI hardware, and the questions Bessent raised go to whether the company complied with them.

Bessent asked whether Nvidia's culture had led it to overlook signs that shell companies, many of them based in Singapore, were funnelling its chips to China. "Were they pressing these seemingly illicit sales to goose their revenues and their earnings?" he said. Bloomberg separately reported the 10-day window and described the sales Bessent referred to as "seemingly illicit" chip sales to China.

Reuters' account did not say what step, if any, the administration would take if the board missed the deadline, which would run to roughly November 25.

Huang stepped down after admitting a relationship with Alice Huang, founder of Singapore GPU cloud provider Megaspeed, whom US officials suspect of spying for China. Beijing has denied the allegation, and Megaspeed has said reports about its supply chain lack verifiable evidence. The two Huangs are not related. Bessent had already said that the Commerce Department held back on blacklisting Megaspeed, a claim that led Senator Richard Blumenthal to call for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to step down.

Nvidia's board has named chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim chief executive. The Financial Times reported on Friday that the board had approached Arm Holdings chief executive Rene Haas about the role. Haas would be an outside hire of the kind Bessent described, though neither Nvidia nor Arm has confirmed any talks.

Other voices are pulling the board the opposite way. Altimeter Capital's Brad Gerstner and Atreides Management's Gavin Baker have written to directors urging them not to rush and to keep Huang's return as chief executive on the table. An online petition asking the board to reinstate Huang had attracted more than 115,000 signatures by Saturday afternoon, including 5,965 people who said they were current Nvidia employees, according to TechCrunch. Elon Musk, Epic Games chief executive Tim Sweeney and Replit chief executive Amjad Masad are among the signatories.

The board also faces a proposed securities class action, filed on November 9 in federal court in San Jose, which accuses Nvidia and Huang of misleading investors about his relationship with Alice Huang. The claims have not been tested in court.

Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17, its first set of numbers since Huang's exit and the first public forum at which Kress could address the questions Bessent raised.