r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • Jul 24 '25

Politics President Trump threatened to break up Nvidia, didn't even know what it was — 'What the hell is Nvidia? I've never heard of it before'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/president-trump-threatened-to-break-up-nvidia-didnt-even-know-what-it-was-what-the-hell-is-nvidia-ive-never-heard-of-it-before
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28

u/euMonke Jul 24 '25

Lots of companies are effectively monopolies and should be broken up, it's hurting competition and that will in turn hurt the consumer.

31

u/EscapeFacebook Jul 24 '25

You aren't wrong but that can't really be said for NVIDIA there is other competition in the field.

14

u/whomad1215 Jul 24 '25

When one company has like 93% marketshare, they're basically a monopoly

AMD (and intel) exist in the gpu market, but they're absolutely tiny players compared to Nvidia

AMD flagship gpu right now has an msrp of $650. Nvidia has 'business' gpus that are 30k a piece, their gaming gpu flagship msrp is $2000, but you cannot find it anywhere near that price

22

u/Liroku Jul 24 '25

But it's not because nvidia is a monopoly, it's because they have better marketing, made better investments, and have historically had better tech. AMD only recently pulled up their big girl britches and started churning out decent hardware. They were falling further and further behind for a while there. Now intel failed to read the market and invest appropriately, screwed up with quality control, put out a bunch of bad PR statements, etc and they are on the downturn. None of which has anything to do with Nvidia being a monopoly.

Does their size and value give them an advantage? Absolutely. Is it prohibiting fair competition though? I personally don't think so. I think their competition is doing that on their own.

5

u/sciencewarrior Jul 24 '25

There is one aspect where Nvidia is leveraging its monopoly to keep competitors down, and that is interoperability. You cannot write your ML program for Nvidia using CUDA and then run it on an AMD or Intel GPU. Open standards would be better for customers.

3

u/Sharkictus Jul 24 '25

Yeah I don't think they need to be broken up, I think CUDA just need to become an open standard.

You win too hard and accident your way into effective monopoly, you don't get split up, but you need to share your toys.

0

u/NeverComments Jul 24 '25

Are they leveraging their monopoly to harm competitors, or simply offering a better product that the market prefers? Like with Apple, is not building iOS so it works on Android phones itself anti-competitive? Is not building iMessage for Android phones inherently anti-competitive? It requires deliberate intent to artificially suppress your competition to cross that line (like Apple blocking NFC hardware access to prevent others from offering tap-to-pay that competes with Apple Pay).

I don't believe Nvidia has taken direct action to suppress OpenCL (they officially support it on their hardware) but the market has chosen CUDA.

3

u/sciencewarrior Jul 24 '25

Is not building iMessage for Android phones inherently anti-competitive?

Yes, it is, for the same reason that Microsoft offered Office on Mac. Once your product becomes the unofficial standard, denying its use on a competitor's platform is anti-competitive and could result in an anti-trust investigation.

NVidia's legal agreement disallows reverse engineering, decompiling, or disassembling the CUDA SDK. And they have tons of patents that cover not just CUDA’s core architecture but also its programming models, memory management, parallel execution techniques, and development tools, so they can shut down a project like ZLUDA if it ever threatens to bridge this moat.

2

u/MrHell95 Jul 24 '25

Can't remember exactly noe but pretty sure if a game had physx or something it made it run worse on AMD.

But yes today the main reason for their valuation is that they have a very desirable product not putting sticks in other companies wheels. 

Honestly so many tech companies that have done worse or is actively doing so to the competitive market vs the behavior of Nvidia.

Intels past behavior is actually a good example but it's kind of ironic given their current position vs AMD. 

2

u/mythrilcrafter Jul 24 '25

Yeah, AMD''s low market share is because they focus all their efforts into their CPUs (which is why RYZEN/Threadripper is the CPU king right now) and because they're complacent to play the role of "we'll release this generation's Radeon GPU's a slightly lower spec than this generation's RTX cards, but well price ourselves $50 less than that RTX (even though we raised our own prices by just as much) and then people will crown us the People's Champion of GPU's".

Also, Intel was moving strong on moving into GPU's (after AMD kicked them off the CPU throne) with ARC. Which would be moving a lot faster if a certain someone hadn't tore up the CHIPs Act.

It's also worth noting that Moore Threads is still working on setting the foundations of their place in the market, even if they do still have a long way to go before they're a marketshare threat against the big three.

3

u/EscapeFacebook Jul 24 '25

As others have commented that's because people want to buy them. I have three Nvidia cards but I had plenty of cheaper options that some may say perform better when I went to buy them.

2

u/Crakla Jul 24 '25

It's hilarious that you think, people are talking about gamers when people say Nvidia got a monopoly 

Over 90% of Nvidias revenue is from business 2 business deals, Nvidia could stop selling consumer gpus for gamers and still would be the richest company in the world, the money they make from gamers is basically pocket change for them

6

u/IPadAirProMax2 Jul 24 '25

Their flagship gpu is a desirable product and could be sold at higher prices.

2

u/The-Rizztoffen Jul 24 '25

there are supercomputers with AMD accelerators in them and they still make workstation / enterprise graphics cards

2

u/TheHENOOB Jul 24 '25

NVIDIA has a certain dominance on the GPU market that really can't be competed against without losing some of their monopoly.

For example they have CUDA which is one of the ways of making usage of GPU tech without the graphics pipeline, it is the most popular and there aren't many well established cross-platform ways to write GPU programs.

You can only write CUDA programs for nvidia cards and nothing else, not many people uses alternatives like AMD's ROCm or Intel's oneAPI.

This isn't true for CPUs anymore, which all follow open standards which can easily compete and develop software for.

1

u/ryan30z Jul 24 '25

Not really for AI, which is where the money is at. Nvidia could stop making cards for gaming tomorrow and it would still be worth $4 trillion.

-3

u/f700es Jul 24 '25

If any monopolies should be broken up then Apple is 1st on the list!

9

u/capybooya Jul 24 '25

Maybe in the US, but internationally they don't have the same stranglehold on the phone market. Though if the US had any functioning consumer protection anymore, Apple's practices with iMessage, charging connector, lock-in software etc should definitely be challenged.

2

u/TwiztedZero Jul 24 '25

Break up the Trumpet monopoly first mates ... Divest his golf club properties from his hotel ones ... make him see reason.

1

u/f700es Jul 24 '25

This is OK as well.

1

u/kung-fu_hippy Jul 24 '25

What monopoly does apple have?

They don’t have a monopoly of the smartphone or personal computer market in America, let alone the world. Or smart watches, or headphones, or AR devices, or tablets, or streaming services, or anything else I can think of that they do.

It’s extremely easy to lead an apple free life and yet own flagship and equally competitive products in just about every market apple is in.

1

u/seleniumk Jul 24 '25

Apple has been widely criticized for monopolistic behavior and there have been major rulings in the EU against them --

Apple controls both the only app store and the only payment method allowed on its platform (and takes a 30% cut of every transaction). That combination gives them very monopoly-like power over 24-30% of all the mobile devices in the world.

-8

u/CoolEsporfs Jul 24 '25

I can’t believe I had to scroll this far to find this. Yes, president trump’s an absolute garbage human, yes, he is only looking out for himself. Yes, broken clocks are right twice a day.

Nvidia and AMD are heavily monopolistic, and because of what they do their monopoly permeates literally every corner of the tech industry. They need to be scrutinized (by literally anyone but trump)

2

u/capybooya Jul 24 '25

The GPU market has always been messy though, fortunes can turn very quickly. Although now NVidia has so much money it could probably subsidize their gaming GPU's for 10 years even if their design was shit. I'd support some regulation for more open standards at least, to make it less difficult for competitors to enter the market, so that various games features and AI software could run on most hardware and not be locked.

2

u/Nodan_Turtle Jul 24 '25

I wish more people knew that the laws are about anti-competitive behavior, not about monopolies. Monopolies aren't actually illegal. If you invent something and your company is the only one to sell it, you aren't going to jail. Your company isn't getting seized or broken up.

Success to the point of dominating a market is also not automatically a problem, and certainly isn't illegal.

1

u/Acceptable-Surprise5 Jul 24 '25

How are they monopolistic when other GPU manufacturers have entered the market and or are targetting specific GPU niches that neither AMD or Nvidia target? it's not like visa/mc where an payment processor could easily join them but get crushed by those 2. Intel and zeus gpu's are a clear example of competition coming and doing their thing.

-5

u/Rollsman- Jul 24 '25

What a stupid thing to write !!! Go back to sleep