During a speech to mark the unveiling of his new AI Action Plan, Donald Trump revealed that he suggested simply breaking up Nvidia, despite appearing to have never heard of the company or its CEO, Jensen Huang.
Trump made the remarks on stage at an AI summit in Washington, D.C., as he unveiled the United States’ new AI Action Plan.
The President made reference and gave thanks to some of AI’s top industry leaders, “And a very special thanks to some of the top industry leaders here, including somebody that’s amazing,” he said, alluding to Huang.
Very carefully.
Seriously though that’s a job for the FTC and their peers on other countries. It would start with an evaluation to confirm that NVIDIA does indeed have monopolistic power (they reportedly have 92% of the GPU market, which is waaaay over the thresholds of most courts for determining that), which would lead to an investigation and discovery process. I’m not naive enough to think breaking them up would be simple or easy. There isn’t enough publicly available information to do anything more than speculate on what a breakup would look like.
There are other remedies available too. On the extreme side there is nationalization, while on the more moderate side there’s fines or additional regulations.
That kind of thoughtful, attention-driven process is really the hallmark of any trump enterprise much less ‘administration’.
Right, but when a company basically only has one product, how do you break that up?
Google can be broken up because they have many different product offerings, same with Amazon.
Nvidia only makes GPUs. The only option would be to artificially handicap Nvidia, or subsidize their competitors.
As someone else already commented, NVIDIA does a lot more than make GPU’s. In fact, they don’t even make GPU’s, but rather design the chips. The chip manufacturing, and usually the board built around the chip, are outsourced. Chip manufacturing monopoly is a separate issue.
You can still break them up. I never said it would be easy. You could spend semesters in law/business school studying the process, but basically the FTC and/or DOJ would open an investigation into NVIDIA and do market analysis to determine the best solution. It would probably take a few years and smmillions of dollars to have all sorts of experts involved. I could pull some idea out of my ass for you here, but it would be just as worthless as anything else random person on Lemmy would propose.
Government subsidies have failed pretty spectacularly and cause more messes than they solve. Look at the dairy industry- it led to overproduction of milk, environmental devastation, the government spending billions of dollars, and contributed heavily to obesity in the US today. Or the oil industry, which is just a huge mess now (also in part because so many of the child companies of Standard Oil that WERE broken up were later allowed to re-merge). They could still be explored as part of a comprehensive solution, but I’d be skeptical of their effectiveness. Even a market with 2, or even 3 competitors if you add Intel, would probably not be sufficient. For consumers, for strategic redundancy, for employees, for board partners, for manufacturing partners, and every other business partner.
They also make full servers, and software products like CUDA, but the servers are basically a chassis for the GPUs and CUDA only runs on Nvidia.