Nvidia must 'go outside' firm to find new CEO, US Treasury chief says

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that American chipmaker Nvidia needs to look outside the company for a new chief executive following the resignation of founder Jensen Huang last week.

"This makes me think that as the board conducts a search for a new leader that they need to go outside the company, that just with what was going on inside the company, they need a dramatic shakeup," Bessent told Fox News.

US President Donald Trump recommended Apple's Executive Chair Tim Cook to become the next chief executive of the American chipmaker following Huang's resignation.

While praising Huang as an innovator, Bessent argued that technological leadership does not excuse compliance lapses, noting that federal regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which supervises national banks, would swiftly remove executives over similar oversight failures in the financial sector.

He questioned whether Nvidia ignored warning signs involving shell companies in Singapore, pointing out that the firm stopped publishing certain regional sales figures after Chinese revenue fell, and Singaporean sales surged, citing reports that only 1% of chips sold there remained in the country.

"I don't think we need the legislation. We have all the rules we need. We just need them enforced," he said.

Huang stepped down on Nov. 12 after leading Nvidia for more than three decades and acknowledging an extramarital relationship with Alice Huang, the former chief executive of Singapore-based cloud firm Megaspeed, who has been identified in media reports as an alleged Chinese intelligence asset.

Dismissing espionage speculation as a "canard," Bessent said his primary concern is whether Nvidia's corporate culture encouraged "seemingly illicit sales" to inflate earnings, demanding answers from the company's board and outside counsel within 10 days.