Nvidia should look “outside the company” to replace its CEO, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said — but it shouldn’t wait too Huang.
Founder Jensen Huang famously had no succession plan and the board must now push a “dramatic shakeup,” Bessent told Larry Kudlow Sunday on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The $4 trillion firm also owes the Trump administration answers within 10 days about whether it was profiting off of banned chip sales.
“I want to keep coming back to what was the culture at Nvidia, and were they pressing these seemingly illicit sales to goose their revenues and their earnings?” Bessent said.
“And I think we need answers in the next 10 days from the board and from the outside counsel.”
Huang, 63, resigned last week as president, CEO and director of the company, which he cofounded at a Denny’s in 1993.
His exit followed reports of an affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy, as well as a married underling at the company.
“This makes me think that as the board conducts a search for a new leader that they need to go outside the company,” Bessent said. “They needed a dramatic shakeup.”
Huang admitted to the affair Nov. 8 in a staff-wide memo. Three days later, The New York Times reported that he had also had a relationship with an Nvidia executive who reported directly to him.
The board accepted his resignation that night and announced it the following morning.
CFO Colette Kress took over as interim CEO. Harvey Jones, a director since the company’s founding, became the company’s first-ever board chair.
Nvidia has said it will consider both internal and external candidates for the permanent replacement.
Here’s the latest on the Nvidia CEO’s affair with an alleged Chinese spy:
The Treasury secretary has spent the week pressing a narrower question than who’s sleeping with whom: who bought Nvidia’s chips, and where they ended up.
Alice Huang was an executive for the Singapore-based, Alibaba-backed datacenter company Megaspeed, which has been accused of smuggling high-end Nvidia chips to China — despite a US ban.
“The real story here should be, did Nvidia know their client?” Bessent said Friday on CNBC. He added that anyone at the company responsible for letting chips slip through the cracks should be “held accountable.”
“We do not know for a fact that Jensen Huang knew this,” he added.
Megaspeed denies wrongdoing.
Bessent also blamed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s team, whose jurisdiction includes export controls.
He said Treasury, the State Department, the Defense Department and the US Trade Representative had backed blacklisting Megaspeed “for months.”
Nvidia will report quarterly earnings Tuesday, its first report without Huang at the helm.
Huang has also agreed to a closed-door interview with three House committees Dec. 1, and the Senate Banking Committee has asked him to testify the same week.
