President Donald Trump recently revealed he once proposed breaking up Nvidia to reduce its dominance in AI chips but changed his mind after learning more about the company and its CEO Jensen Huang.
- Trump’s breakup idea: During a Washington tech summit on July 23 unveiling his AI Action Plan, Trump admitted he had never heard of Nvidia before being advised that the company controls nearly 100 percent of the AI accelerator market. Trump explained that he was informed it would take 10 years for competitors to catch up even if Nvidia were mismanaged.
- “What the hell is Nvidia?”: “I said, look, we’ll break this guy up,” Trump recounted. “This is before I learned the facts of life.” When told Huang was behind the company, Trump asked: “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.” Realizing how dominant Nvidia was, Trump decided not to pursue a breakup.
- Shift in stance: After meeting Jensen Huang, Trump said the Taiwanese American billionaire was “a great guy” and praised Nvidia’s meteoric rise to a $4 trillion valuation. During this period, Huang successfully convinced the Trump administration to allow Nvidia to sell its H20 chips to China, reopening a major source of revenue that had been restricted due to national security concerns. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained that only the “fourth-best” AI chips are permitted for export, stating the goal is to get Chinese developers “addicted to the American technology stack.”
This story is part of The Rebel Yellow Newsletter — a bold weekly newsletter from the creators of NextShark, reclaiming our stories and celebrating Asian American voices.
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