U.S. President Donald Trump says he considered breaking up AI darling Nvidia before learning more about the chipmaker and its CEO, Jensen Huang.
“I said, ‘Look, we’ll break this guy up,’ before I learned the facts of life,” Trump said of Huang during a Wednesday speech about his new AI Action Plan. The U.S. president then appeared to recount an earlier conversation with an advisor about Nvidia’s market share, its CEO, and potentially breaking up the company.
“I said, who the hell is he? What’s his name…What the hell is Nvidia? I’ve never heard of it before,” the president said of the world’s most valuable tech company.
“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… Then I got to know Jensen and now I see why,” he said, inviting Huang, who was sitting in the audience, to stand up.
The president made the comments during an AI summit hosted in Washington on Wednesday, but it’s unclear when the original conversation about potentially breaking up the company took place.
Representatives for Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment made by Fortune.
Huang’s relationship with Trump
Huang scored a win for Nvidia from the U.S. president earlier this month.
Following a meeting between Huang and Trump at the White House, the Trump administration lifted restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 AI chip exports to China, allowing the company to sell the chips in the lucrative market and reversing previous Trump administration restrictions.
Per the New York Times, Huang engaged in months of lobbying for the policy change, meeting with Trump, testifying before Congress, and working closely with White House allies like AI adviser David Sacks. The CEO argued that restricting chip sales would hurt U.S. tech leadership by allowing Chinese rivals to dominate, and emphasized that Nvidia’s chips were crucial for global AI standards.
The tech giant has been on something of a winning streak of late. Earlier this month, the company made history when it became the first in the world to reach a market value of $4 trillion. The company’s stock has soared over the past five years, with a nearly 18% gain registered year-to-date. Nvidia’s supercharged growth is driven by the AI boom and the company’s near-monopoly on AI chip manufacturing. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are used by all major tech companies to maintain and develop AI models.
The company’s dominance in AI hardware has made it a key player in global tech geopolitics, particularly as governments scrutinize the export of advanced semiconductor technology amid rising U.S.-China tensions.
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