Bessent Publicly Blames Commerce for Megaspeed Blacklist Delay

The comment came in a CNBC interview flagged by the Guardian, and it narrows the story to something more concrete than the usual Washington fog. Bessent tied the proposed blacklist to a specific aim: stopping Nvidia from exporting advanced chips to Beijing through Megaspeed, a data company whose executive is alleged to be a Chinese spy.

That allegation matters, but only as an allegation on the evidence here. What is clearer is the institutional split. Bessent is saying Treasury wants the restriction and Commerce controls whether it becomes an actual rule. In other words, the bottleneck is not rhetoric but paperwork, which is often where policy ambition goes to enjoy a long administrative holiday.

Earlier this week, Axios reported that Bessent confronted commerce secretary Howard Lutnick in the White House Situation Room over the failure to blacklist Megaspeed. Bessent declined to comment on that reported meeting when speaking to CNBC, but his on-record line about Commerce’s role did the more useful job anyway: it assigned responsibility in public.

For Nvidia, this is not yet a new penalty or a disclosed change in export rules. It is a cabinet-level dispute over whether one customer channel should be cut off, with Treasury now making plain that the hold-up sits elsewhere.