Trump weighed Nvidia breakup but was told it’d be ‘hard’

US President Donald Trump said he considered attempting to break up Nvidia to increase competition in artificial intelligence (AI) chips before finding out “it’s not easy in that business”.

“I said, ‘Look, we will break this guy up’, before I learned the facts here,” Trump said on Wednesday (Jul 23) at an AI summit in Washington. Trump said he was told by aides that doing so was “very hard” and that the company held a substantial advantage over all competitors that would take years to overcome.

“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,” Trump added.

Nvidia declined to comment.

Trump went on to praise Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang, who was in the audience for his event. Huang met earlier this month with the president at the White House, and last week the company announced it would be allowed to resume selling its H20 AI 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.

“What a job you have done,” Trump said. Throughout his address, the president name-checked and complimented Huang, along with other tech industry leaders, for their investments in the US.

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Earlier in the day, Huang used his session on stage to praise the president’s approach to AI. “America’s unique advantage that no other country can possibly have is President Trump,” Huang said.

Nvidia earlier this month became the first company ever to surpass US$4 trillion in market capitalisation, as it has profited heavily from the boom in demand for AI hardware to power large language models.

The Justice Department in 2024 conducted an investigation seeking evidence of possible anti-competitive behaviour by Nvidia.

Trump at the event on Wednesday unveiled his AI Action Plan, which, paired with a series of executive orders, is designed to aid the industry by reducing regulatory burdens. BLOOMBERG