There’s a bitter war over trade policy underway behind the scenes of the Trump administration, revolving around an unlikely fulcrum: a tech CEO’s inability to keep it in his pants.
You’ve probably heard of Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, one of the largest makers of chips and technologies that power the economic clout of artificial intelligence. Huang was forced to resign earlier this week after the shocking revelation that he had an extramarital affair with a woman named Alice Huang – no relation – who US intelligence considers an asset to the Chinese government. Until his resignation, Huang was one of the country’s most important CEOs, presiding over the world’s most valuable company. He sat next to Trump at a state dinner with China in September and essentially put the president on speed dial.
But where the various money men in Trump’s cabinet are involved has to do with the mistress, Alice Huang, who also happens to be the head of a Singaporean company called Megaspeed that was buying up Nvidia chips as fast as she could get them.
THE New York Times reports that the Treasury, Defense, and State departments all wanted to put Megaspeed on a commercial blacklist for months — even before the Huang honeypot affair broke — but they weren’t the ones who made the final decision. No, this particular blacklist is managed by the Department of Commerce, headed by Howard Lutnick. Lutnick has been something of a dove when it comes to sanctions policy, campaigning against wide-ranging export restrictions that would block, for example, the sale of AI chips to a front company for Chinese intelligence services, but also hamper the work of various other countries. And on Nvidia in particular, Lutnik is essentially a loyal friend. THE Times also reports that, like Trump, Lutnick has a personal relationship with Huang and has repeatedly gone lenient with him when it comes to trade policy decisions like this.
All of this appears to have royally pissed off the other big money man in Trump’s cabinet: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose department had been trying for months to get Commerce to blacklist Megaspeed. This conflict came to a head, Axios reports, during a direct confrontation between the two men in the Situation Room on the Thursday after the midterm elections, after which Lutnick said he would “look into it.” Axios reports that other officials had repeatedly warned one of Lutnick’s deputies, Deputy Secretary Jeff Kessler, about Megaspeed’s risks before the situation room confrontation.
Bessent addressed the issue publicly on Friday. “You’ll have to ask them about their internal processes,” Bessent said on CNBC this morning, referring to the Commerce Department’s refusal to blacklist Megaspeed, thereby throwing Lutnick under the bus. “The real story here should be: Did Nvidia know their customer and did they go to great lengths at Nvidia to make sure there was no leak and that they were selling to shell companies that were obviously shell companies?”
Lutnik seems to understand that his role in the Nvidia fallout is going to be scrutinized. A spokesperson told CNN on Friday that the secretary had “proactively agreed” to appear voluntarily before the Congressional Banking Committee – meaning he will have to face some of these questions directly in the near future.
The second part of Bessent’s quote, however, is part of a big question administration officials are likely asking: What did Huang or his people know? Did the man who called Trump on stage at tech conferences know he was sleeping with a Chinese spy and selling him advanced AI chips? It’s not like Megaspeed’s activities are particularly subtle. THE Times reports that the company was purchasing Nvidia’s chips and using them to set up data centers in Southeast Asia that would serve Chinese companies, bypassing U.S. export controls. The U.S. government was also investigating the company for literally smuggling some chips directly into China, which seems like the kind of thing Nvidia’s CEO should perhaps have been aware of before he started sleeping with Megaspeed’s top executive.
Alas, the heart wants what it wants. Scott Bessent’s heart, one presumes, really wants to hit Lutnick over the head with a folding chair. It seems that Alice Huang’s heart wanted to circumvent US regulations in the name of China’s technology industry. And Jensen Huang, well, he just wanted to kiss women and look good in a leather jacket — and it turns out he had the chops to do that all along.
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