US President Donald Trump has admitted he considered breaking up Jensen Huang's chipmaking company Nvidia Corp. to increase competition in the artificial intelligence chip space before he found out that “it’s not easy in that business.”
Speaking at an AI summit in Washington on Wednesday, Trump said, “I said, ‘Look, we’ll break this guy up,’ before I learned the facts here.”
He was told by his aides that breaking up Nvidia was “very hard” and that the company had a substantial advantage over its competitors, which will take years to change, Trump said.
“I figured we could go in and we could sort of break them up a little bit, get them a little competition, and I found out it’s not easy in that business,” the Republican leader added.
Nvidia has not commented on Trump's admission.
Donald Trump praises Jensen Huang
Speaking further at the summit, Donald Trump went on to praise Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was attending the event. “What a job you’ve done,” he said.
Earlier this month, Huang met Trump at the White House. Nvidia had last week announced it would be allowed to resume selling its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China as part of a recent trade truce with Beijing. The Trump administration had previously frozen the sale of those chips to China.
At Wednesday's event, Trump name-checked and praised Huang, as well as other tech industrialists, for their investments in the US.
Jensen Huang also used the stage earlier in the day to compliment Donald Trump's approach on AI.
“America’s unique advantage that no other country can possibly have is President Trump,” Huang said.
Earlier this month, Nvidia became the first company ever to surpass $4 trillion in market capitalisation, as it has profited heavily from the boom in demand for AI hardware to power large language models.
The Trump administration released a new artificial intelligence blueprint on Wednesday that aims to loosen environmental rules and vastly expand AI exports to allies, in a bid to maintain the American edge over China in the critical technology.
Trump marked the plan's release with a speech where he laid out the stakes of the technological arms race with China, calling it a fight that will define the 21st century.
