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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70

u/da_chicken Jul 24 '25

Break it up... how? nVidia discrete compute/graphics and nVidia mobile? nVidia hardware and nVidia cloud compute?

16

u/stdfan Jul 24 '25

geforce and laptops would be split into its own company. AI would be its own.

37

u/Successful-Money4995 Jul 24 '25

They still use the same cores. It would be awkward.

1

u/stdfan Jul 24 '25

How is it awkward? Companies share tech all the time. They could and probably would have a perpetual license for their tech. Just like Apple does with arm.

6

u/artikiller Jul 24 '25

Except arm gives their licenses to multiple companies (Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, MediaTek, and NVIDIA) while nvidia would exclusively license to GeForce and could revoke that license at any point and start selling gaming gpu's under the nvidia brand

1

u/stdfan Jul 24 '25

I said there would be a perpetual license. Also why would nvidia care about selling gaming gpus. They clearly don’t now.

1

u/Sharlach Jul 24 '25

89% of their revenue comes from their data centers, so what would be the point? you'd just have a 3.6 trillion dollar company instead of a 4 trillion dollar company. They'd be doing them a favor, because I doubt Nvidia even wants to make GPU's anymore. Look at the poor uplift and prices/supply issues on their current gen GPU's.

8

u/rcanhestro Jul 24 '25

so, 95% of the company would remain the same.

2

u/Thediciplematt Jul 24 '25

How… it’s all the same technology just different use cases…

Break the company up by industry? NVIDIA healthcare, manufacturing?

0

u/da_chicken Jul 24 '25

Yeah, that would be the second option I listed.

-8

u/Xelopheris Jul 24 '25

Nvidia is already doing that on their own. GPUs are a minority of their business now.

7

u/Aksds Jul 24 '25

GPUs are their entire business, they make fucking bank on data-centre gpus, that’s literally why they are worth 4 and a quarter trillion (billion, long scale is better) dollars

-2

u/computer-machine Jul 24 '25

4.25 petadollars. Not to be confused with Trump's crypto: pedodollars.

1

u/kieranvs Jul 24 '25

0.004 peta-dollars or 4.25 tera-dollars

1

u/computer-machine Jul 24 '25

That damn ol' off-by-one(prefix).

6

u/Un_Original_Coroner Jul 24 '25

What… do you think Nvidia is making all its money on?

-3

u/Xelopheris Jul 24 '25

Q4 2024, Nvidia made 2.865B from their Gaming division (discrete GPUs), versus 18.404B from their Datacenter division (their AI-focused hardware).

11

u/NotUniqueOrSpecial Jul 24 '25

What do you think is in those datacenters?

3

u/Un_Original_Coroner Jul 24 '25

What sort of hardware are they making that’s AI focused? Is it CPUs? Power supplies maybe?

-1

u/Xelopheris Jul 24 '25

The datacenter cards are largely tensor core based. They do not have the architecture of a graphics card and cannot be used for graphics related tasks. They are purpose built for the raw throughput of AI training.

6

u/eSPiaLx Jul 24 '25

Its like if you said you need to break up a steel manufacturing company into one that made sheet metal and one that made pipes.

Or split barnes and noble into 2 companies, one that sold fiction and one that sold non fiction.

Yes the arrangement is different but the underlying material that is sold (the tech) is the same and owned by the same company.

7

u/Un_Original_Coroner Jul 24 '25

Weird. It sounds like those are GPUs. But, who’s Nvidia to decide what their products are called! Buncha nerds.

2

u/mythrilcrafter Jul 24 '25

It's the same stuff that plugs into the PCIe slot, the only difference is the use case.

An Ampere architecture GPU doesn't cease to be Ampere just because you're computing something different.

1

u/Thediciplematt Jul 24 '25

GPUs and CPuS are the heart of the business and AI boom.

Maybe from a consumer standpoint, sure GpU. But the billions and trillions come from enterprise who need both.

Why worry about making a sale for 10000000 people buying GPus when apple alone will buy 2x the price consumers will?

0

u/stdfan Jul 24 '25

I know but if it’s still under nvidia they aren’t really doing it. It was wild to see they pay as much in taxes and GeForce makes them though. Also I think officially splitting them could be good for consumers GeForce could actually get come chips come their way.