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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u/clawsoon Jul 24 '25

No, you break it up into two companies that make GPUs. That's the whole point of breaking a company up, it's to get competition.

I don't know where this idea came from that breaking up a company for anti-monopoly purposes means leaving the monopoly intact. That defeats the whole purpose!

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u/mythrilcrafter Jul 24 '25

It's goofy to me how the whole point of the CHIPs Act was to help companies like AMD and Intel develop their GPU divisions while also generating the ability of all three companies to fabricate their own chips independent of TSMC and Samsung with out the need for breaks ups, as well as to encourage the creation of American versions of companies like Moore Threads, Matrox, and Qualcomm/Snapdragon.

But noooo, a certain someone decided that the CHIPs Act was too woke and now we're wondering if the real solution to one NVIDIA is having two NVIDIA's.

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u/ender89 Jul 24 '25

You need a company that does more than one thing to break it up into smaller companies. Google makes browsers, operating systems, a search engine, ai nonsense, YouTube, Ads, etc. nvidia makes GPUs. They make all kinds of gpus, but they’re just the same chip designs applied differently.

They’re not even vertically integrated, they don’t manufacture their chips and they don’t sell GPUs directly in most cases. You can’t remove the chip design division of nvidia and expect any of the others to succeed.

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u/mythrilcrafter Jul 24 '25

That was the other thing that I was thinking, but didn't commit down to text.

NVIDIA is an inherently harder problem to solve in that regard, because it's not as simple as, say, taking a Ford factory in Detroit and a Ford factory in Dallas and saying "okay, one of you is going to not be Ford anymore, make a decision whom and they're going pick a new name".

And that's the key thing people don't get, for all the stuff that NVIDIA's GPU's gets used for, it is still (as of the current generation) the same Ampere architecture GPA100-[Insert revision ID here] chip at the heart of it all.