U.S. Treasury Secretary questions whether Nvidia knowingly sold AI GPUs to shell companies, says company itself is responsible — ‘I think it is important that anyone at the company there be held accountable for that’
Scott Bessent wonders whether Nvidia's management knew about selling restricted hardware to shell companies, but does not directly blame Jensen Huang of anything.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has expressed doubt over whether Nvidia knowingly sold artificial intelligence graphics processing units (GPUs) to shell companies in China, emphasizing the importance of holding individuals within the company accountable. Bessent acknowledged that existing export controls cannot prevent all restricted hardware from reaching China or other adversaries, which explains why the country allegedly obtained millions of restricted AI GPUs from Nvidia.
However, he criticized the company's internal controls and called for accountability, without attributing the potential wrongdoing to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Bessent stressed that it was unclear if senior Nvidia executives were aware of the potentially illicit practices. He also criticized Nvidia's general counsel Timothy Teter, who reached out to the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the detention of Megaspeed's Alice Wong in Singapore.
Bessent did not speculate about potential consequences for Nvidia if executives were found to have known about the clients' roles as intermediaries for Chinese entities. He expressed confidence in Nvidia's board of directors conducting a thorough investigation into the matter.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
