Trump briefly considered breaking up Nvidia to spur competition, then backed off

[Daniel Sims]

Recap: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's recent visit to Washington seems to have paid off in more ways than imagined. The company successfully convinced the Trump administration to loosen recent export controls, and the president reconsidered breaking up Nvidia after learning more about the chip-making business.

President Donald Trump said he briefly considered splitting up Nvidia, the world's largest chipmaker and most valuable company. Trump initially thought doing so might intensify competition in the artificial intelligence and chipmaking industries, but later learned that any new players would take years to catch up.

The president made the comments at a recent AI summit in Washington while praising CEO Jensen Huang, who was in attendance. Aides told Trump, who hadn't heard of Nvidia or Huang until recently, that a breakup would be tough.

Nvidia's biggest victory from the visit came from gaining permission to resume sales of H20 data center GPUs in China. The company was forced to cancel orders and halt sales following the Trump administration's April export controls, halving its Chinese market share and causing billions in losses.

The US is concerned about potential military applications for Nvidia's advanced chips, but Huang said China's military wouldn't need American technology. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that the Trump administration allowed the export ban reversal because the H20 is no longer Nvidia's fastest product.

US officials also hope to maintain China's reliance on US chips and delay the development of homegrown solutions, such as DeepSeek. Huang explained that the US can remain a leader in the AI market if other countries build upon American technology, favoring open-source research and development.

However, restarting H20 sales in China will take time. Nvidia will fulfill orders until remaining stocks are depleted, but manufacturing more could take nine months, according to The Information. TSMC's semiconductor production facilities are fully occupied, and Nvidia shifted production capacity to other products following the ban.

The AI boom has increased the chipmaker's value by more than an order of magnitude over the past three years, turning it into the world's first $4 trillion public company. Nvidia's stock has increased by around 20% since the start of this year.

However, some warn that the market has become dangerously overhyped. A top economist recently demonstrated that AI has created a bubble larger than the turn-of-the-millennium dot-com bubble. Another analyst claims that rising stocks of other tech giants, which represent most of the S&P 500's recent growth, depend almost entirely on sales of Nvidia GPUs.

Permalink to story:

Trump briefly considered breaking up Nvidia to spur competition, then backed off

 

[unoficialoficial]

The F-35 Avionics system's CPU has a processing power of 1 GFLOPS, 1 MB L2 cache and 512 MB DRAM (similar to the capabilities of a Pentium III-era processor). It is the most “powerful” chip used in any air fighter. Consequently, weapons systems don't require a lot of processing power.

 

[OortCloud]

Wonder how much money he had to quietly slip into Donald Trumps private coffers to make him TACO?
He's going to need all of that to pay for the lawyers and assassins to get him out of his Epstein/Maxwell disgusting past.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

A breakup would have set one hell of a precedent. Considering that AMD exists, as does intel, and both have made GPUs and still do.

It brings up the question of what a monopoly is. If its merely having a dominant position, how much dominance qualifies you as a monopoly? Would Wal Mart be considered a monopoly?

This is probably how Jensen convinced Trump to back off. It could have set off a domino effect of breakups. Whether this would be good for consumers or investors is another story.

Wonder how much money he had to quietly slip into Donald Trumps private coffers to make him TACO?
He's going to need all of that to pay for the lawyers and assassins to get him out of his Epstein/Maxwell disgusting past.

You know what they say about those in glass houses?

There's a reason Democrats, despite having power, never released that list nor ever went after anyone. They wont push this too hard, the last thing they want is to implicate themselves. Now Trump may push it hard enough to blow up in his face, we'll see, but I imagine the hypocrisy from fellow politicians is gonna be so strong itlld evelop its own magnetic field.

 

[Kirby1]

Trump is an ***** that just says anything to see what sticks.

 

[wiyosaya]

There's a reason Democrats, despite having power, never released that list nor ever went after anyone. They wont push this too hard, the last thing they want is to implicate themselves. Now Trump may push it hard enough to blow up in his face, we'll see, but I imagine the hypocrisy from fellow politicians is gonna be so strong itlld evelop its own magnetic field.

Yes, we all know that Democrats are the reason for every problem in the world. Nice attempt at deflecting form the fact that any attempt to break up any company by Trump or any US president would last, in court, well beyond any administration that attempts to do so.

Got any more unfounded conspiracy theories to share?

 

[axiomatic13]

Trump is mind-numbingly stupid. I just don't get the attraction.

 

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Man, what a timeline...

 

[Haaky]

How in the hell does TACO think he has the power to break up a privately owned company?
This mans brain has turned to cream cheese.
This is the best America could choose?
Pathetic.

 

[OortCloud]

Trump is mind-numbingly stupid. I just don't get the attraction.

Have you seen his base interviewed or asked any real questions about his policies, geopolitics or anything that can't be 'learnt' on reality TV or anti-social networks... If the US education system wasn't so broken and it's populace so insular, un-questioning and ludicrously tribal there's no way such an obviously corrupt ignorant bigot would get a vote.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Trump is like the ultimate "only Nixon can go to China" style president.

It's wild that he's somehow managed to get traditionally conservative types to approve of anti-free trade protectionist policies, approve of a massive consumption tax hike through tariffs (and more, but I'll stop there).

If Trump started just breaking up US companies willy-nilly (crazy that we can talk about one guy breaking up corporate entities as if we weren't just pretending to be a Republic) then he'd probably be the "best" radical leftist president in US history by a longshot (as it's often joked that Bill Clinton was the best Republican president thanks to him playing ball with Gingrich and implementing all sorts of austerity measures).

 

[opckieran]

You know what they say about those in glass houses?

There's a reason Democrats, despite having power, never released that list nor ever went after anyone. They wont push this too hard, the last thing they want is to implicate themselves. Now Trump may push it hard enough to blow up in his face, we'll see, but I imagine the hypocrisy from fellow politicians is gonna be so strong itlld evelop its own magnetic field.

(Assuming he is on the list and in a bad way) Had the Dems ousted Trump in that list while they were in power, he would have immediately become a star witness against 95% of big Dem donors, pols, and celebs who are most definitely on that list without a shadow of a doubt. The DNC would have dissolved in a matter of hours.


But the TDS is strong!! It’s not the terrible Dem policies of open borders for example, it’s the voters who are to blame!