Bessent gives Nvidia's board 10 days to answer whether suspect China sales inflated its earnings

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put a clock on Nvidia's▼−3.21% — Nvidia, down 3.21 percent today board on Sunday: 10 days to say whether it pressed "seemingly illicit sales to goose their revenues and their earnings↗" ¹². He wants answers from the board and its outside counsel, and a new chief executive hired from outside the company, a "dramatic shake-up" ¹².

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder, resigned as chief executive on Thursday, November 12, after reports of extramarital affairs↗, one of them with Alice Huang, a former managing director at the Singapore data-center firm Megaspeed who is now under scrutiny for possible Chinese intelligence ties ²⁵⁶. The affairs cost Huang his job ². Treasury's clock runs on the sales channel underneath Nvidia's reported numbers.

The Singapore-billed line is Tuesday's real test

Nvidia reports the October quarter on Tuesday, its first results since Huang left and the first presented by interim CEO Colette Kress, his chief financial officer for 13 years ¹⁵⁸. Megaspeed is suspected by the United States of buying Nvidia chips for its Southeast Asian data centers and routing them to China; it traded more than $4 billion of Nvidia chips over two years, and the Justice Department is investigating it criminally ³⁴.

Kress reportedly questioned some of those deals when they crossed her desk as chief financial officer, and signed them off ². Nvidia's guidance for the quarter assumes no China data-center compute revenue at all ⁴⁵. The line to watch is Singapore-billed revenue, which Bessent says Nvidia stopped breaking out in its filings after direct China sales fell and Singapore billings surged; he cited reports that only about 1 percent of those chips stayed in the country↗ ⁶. Nvidia says it investigated the allegations last year and rejects them ³.

The market has already priced the doubt: more than $1.2 trillion of Nvidia's market value has gone since the scandal broke in late October ¹.

The fight over enforcement has moved inside the cabinet

Bessent also moved the answer off Nvidia's desk and into the cabinet. Treasury, State, Defense and the trade representative favored putting Megaspeed on the export blacklist for months, he said, but "Commerce had the pen↗," and the probe has since passed to the Justice Department ³⁹. The rules already exist, in his telling: Trump authorized sales of the H200 chip to China in late 2025, "nothing above the H200s can be sold to the Chinese," and "we have all the rules we need ²³. We just need them enforced" ²³.

The dates land on Congress first. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appears before the Senate Banking Committee on December 10, and Huang testifies behind closed doors in the House before Thanksgiving ³⁸.

Holders want Huang back; Treasury wants an outsider

The succession the board opened on Thursday, the company's first in 33 years, has split Nvidia's shareholders ²⁸. Altimeter Capital and Atreides Management, two investment firms holding Nvidia stakes of about $1.9 billion and $250 million, urged a "slow, measured" search that keeps "the potential return of Jensen Huang" on the table ²⁸. Separately, a "Stand with Jensen" petition that Elon Musk says he signed↗ passed 108,000 signatures ⁵⁸. Analyst Dan Ives calls a return "ridiculous," and Trump has floated former Apple▲+0.12% — Apple, up 0.12 percent today chief Tim Cook ².

The chips and the demand behind them have not changed, and Nvidia's guidance already assumes the China business is zero ⁴. What is unresolved is whether the market can verify the revenue of the company anchoring the AI buildout, and revenue that cannot be verified trades at a discount until it can be. Tuesday is the first look at whether Kress makes the Singapore line legible, and the clock says the answer is due before the next quarter.