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.
Do I need to explain why “idk actually taking any action or enforcing any of the laws that have existed for over a century seems really hard. We should just allow the megacorporation to continue with their 92% market share” is an even worse idea?
And you alluded to another issue with this. “The backbone of many industries around the globe”. GPU supply isn’t just a matter of allowing privileged people to play their vidyagames. They are a key strategic resource used in a ton of industries, including strategic military functions. The US has already been slowly pushing for more domestic chip production under both Trump and Biden, encouraging TSMC to build their fabrication plant in Arizona for example.
Also it’s really ridiculous to expect some random person on Lemmy to have a solution to such a complicated and nuanced thing that is so dependent on proprietary information to get right. I’m not claiming to have the solution, but it’s obviously a problem and functioning governments have solved this repeatedly throughout history. Even if I did want to propose a more detailed solution you could, rightfully, point out that it’s not possible to do such a thing without inside information about NVIDIA’s operations.
The point is “I dunno, do something” when you don’t even understand what you are talking about is literally what trump was trying to do.
There are already plenty of alternatives to nVidia and MUCH more successful efforts to even avoid the kind of “Well, you COULD use libre office but it won’t support what we do to the docx format next week” stupidity. And… they all basically depend on TSMC which is even funnier.
Similarly, if you actually understand what nVidia’s (hardware) product is, you will know why it fundamentally doesn’t make any sense to split it up. Because the only way that works is “Okay, build all new fabs, all new research divisions, all new software divisions, etc to make the exact same product but with a lot more waste because you need perfect yields”.
No. The solution to this is to incentivize the competition to make it actually competititon. Intel is… moving on. But we already see government orgs around the planet prioritizing AMD purchases. Sometimes just for cost reasons, but it encourages those vendor agnostic shims to continue to exist and, hopefully, will increase AMD’s market share.
But “I dunno, do something to make it go away” is the kind of stupidity that we would expect from the president of the united states. If you can’t contribute to a conversation then… don’t. Or, better yet, actually ask questions rather than immediately jumping to regulation from known compromised agencies.
So you’re clearly just arguing in bad faith. Falling for regulatory bodies to do their jobs, including a thorough investigation and evaluation of possible solutions, is nowhere close to saying “I dunno, do something”. So I have to wonder why you’re arguing in bad faith. Do you own NVIDIA stock perhaps?
What “plenty of alternatives” in the GPU market are you referring to? NVIDIA has a 92% share of the market. This may be a surprise if you slept through your history class on trust busting, but you do not, in fact, need to have 100% market share in order to be deemed to have monopolistic power under US law. The rule of thumb for most courts is 50%, though that is not statutory and can vary from case-to-case.
Also, what Trump HAS been doing is exactly what you suggest: sitting on his hands and allowing NVIDIA to exercise it’s monopoly. He hasn’t done anything at all yet, just like he has not yet deported Musk or cancelled the contracts for any of his companies. It’s all theater, and until I see any actual action I’m just going to assume he is shaking them down for more campaign contributions. Or maybe engaging in some good ol’ stock manipulation.
They’ve tried for years to “encourage competition” and that’s exactly what got us to this point.
Maybe you’re the one who should educate yourself before jumping into this conversation. The history of US anti-trust action is the history of repeated success stories where they are able to introduce competition by breaking up companies like Standard Oil or Bell Telephone, and it’s worked every time… Until future administrations allow those child companies to merge back together again, which is why we once again see these huge corporations once again obtain monopolistic, or at least oligopolistic, power.