U.S. President Donald Trump at one point weighed breaking up Nvidia Corp. to boost market competition.
Trump revealed the deliberations during a late Wednesday speech in Washington, D.C. Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang was among the attendees. Trump’s speech focused on the AI Action Plan, a newly released set of policy proposals that could benefit the graphics card maker.
“I said, ‘Look, we’ll break this guy up,”’ Trump recalled. “This before I learned the facts of life. I said, ‘We’ll break him up.’”
Trump didn’t specify why he considered breaking up Nvidia. Officials usually push to spin off parts of a company over antitrust concerns. During the Biden administration, the U.S. Justice Department reportedly launched an antitrust probe into Nvidia.
Sources told Bloomberg at the time that officials were concerned about the chipmaker’s sales practices. In particular, the Justice Depart reportedly studied whether Nvidia makes access to its graphics cards conditional on customers purchasing its other products or not buying hardware from rivals.
It’s believed the company’s acquisition of Run:ai also drew Justice Department scrutiny. The startup built software that reduces the number of graphics cards needed to run artificial intelligence models. According to Politico, officials were concerned that Nvidia had bought the startup to “bury a technology that could curb its main profit engine.” The Justice Department approved the deal after Nvidia agreed to open-source Run:ai’s software.
In his speech, Trump indicated that he changed his mind about breaking up Nvidia after officials told him doing so would be hard.
“They said, ‘No, sir. He is very hard.’ I said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What percentages of the market does he have?’ They said, ‘He has 100%.’ I said, ‘Who the hell is he? What’s his name?’ ‘His name is Jensen Huang, Nvidia.’”
Trump added that “I figured we could go in and we could sort of break him up a little bit, get him a little competition, and I found out it’s not easy on that business. I said, ‘Suppose we put the greatest minds together. They work hand-in-hand for a couple of years.’ He said, ‘No, it would take at least 10 years to catch him [Huang] if he ran Nvidia totally incompetently from now on.’”
Nvidia already has significant competition in the AI accelerator market. Its rivals range from venture-backed startups to well-established chipmakers such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. It’s unclear which of Nvidia’s business units Trump considered spinning off before he decided not to break up the company.
The AI Action Plan, the new policy paper at the center of Trump’s speech, proposes rule changes that could create more demand for Nvidia’s chips. The document calls for officials to streamline the process of approving new AI data centers and power infrastructure. Additionally, the document recommends that federal agencies accelerate their adoption of “compute environments to support scalable and secure AI workloads.”
Photo: White House
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