Not long ago, President Donald Trump hadn’t even heard of Nvidia, the most valuable tech company in the world. But once he found out about the AI chip giant, he says, he wanted to break it up.
“Before I learned the facts of life, I said, ‘we’ll break him up,’” Trump recalled today, in a speech about his new AI Action Plan at an event hosted in Washington, DC. He recounted what seemed to be a conversation between himself and an advisor who he didn’t name, who told him it would be “very hard” to break up Nvidia:
I said, “why?” I said, “what percentage of the market does he have?”
“Sir, he has 100%,” they said.
“Who the hell is he? What’s his name?”
“His name is Jensen Huang, Nvidia.”
I said, “What the hell is Nvidia? I’ve never heard of it before.”
He said, “you don’t want to know about it, sir.”
Trump said he backed away from breaking up Nvidia after he realized it could be counterproductive. “I figured we could go in and we could sort of break them up a little bit, get them a little competition,” Trump said. “And I found out it’s not easy in that business. I said, ‘suppose that we put the greatest minds together and they work hand-in-hand for a couple of years.’ He said, ‘no, it would take at least ten years to catch him if he ran Nvidia totally incompetently from now on.’ So I said, ‘all right, let’s go on to the next one.’”
“And then I got to know Jensen, and now I see why,” Trump added.
Huang successfully convinced the Trump administration to let Nvidia sell its H20 chips to China, opening a significant new avenue of revenue that the US had previously closed due to concerns it could help a US adversary advance its own AI efforts. To assuage those fears, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has insisted that the chips it’s now allowing to be sold to China are only the “fourth-best” AI chips, and the idea is to get Chinese developers “addicted to the American technology stack.”
Regardless of how it plays out for US policy, the change has been a boon for Nvidia, which even before the announcement had become the first publicly traded company worth $4 trillion. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department had reportedly been probing the company on antitrust grounds. But Trump’s apparent about-face on breaking it up means we probably shouldn’t expect a lawsuit anytime soon.
