Jensen Huang had the dream again.
But this time, it wasn’t about compute shaders or Transformer architectures. It was… different.
He was standing in a Kansas-like cornfield in his signature leather jacket when suddenly, a whirlwind of executive orders and regulatory subpoenas sucked him up and dropped him somewhere strange — somewhere gray and cold. No glowing GTC keynote screens, no humming DGX pods. Just broken circuit boards and headlines in Chinese.
In the dream, it had happened: They broke up NVIDIA.
The AI Tornado That Tore the Heart Out of Silicon Valley
At a recent AI summit, President Trump casually admitted that someone briefed him on a company called “En-Vidia” — a name he claimed he’d never heard before. When he was told they controlled nearly 100% of the global AI chip market, he allegedly responded, “Well, we should probably break them up then. That’s too much power.”
According to Trump, the plan was only abandoned when he was told — even if Huang ran NVIDIA “totally incompetently” — it would take a decade for anyone to catch up. After learning more about Jensen Huang, Trump reversed course, called him “a genius,” and moved on to other obsessions.
But what if he hadn’t?
What if — in some alternate MAGA-verse — the United States did in fact break up NVIDIA?
That’s where Jensen’s dream begins.
The Great Decomposition: NVIDIA in Pieces
In the dream, the DOJ and FTC descended like flying monkeys. NVIDIA was carved up like Bell Telephone. Data center GPUs went to Intel. Consumer graphics landed at AMD. Arm was spun back out. CUDA became an open consortium (or worse, forked by the EU). The Grace Hopper chip design team was sent to Boston Dynamics for “retraining.”
The AI world reeled.
Within months, the silicon pipeline froze. AI startups couldn’t get GPUs. Hyperscalers scrambled to hedge with custom silicon. Training time for LLMs doubled. Inferencing costs tripled. Foundries in Taiwan, Korea and Arizona sat idle, waiting for specs that no longer existed.
It wasn’t just NVIDIA that was broken. The entire AI innovation stack cracked like a fractured die.
The Dragon Awakens
Meanwhile, in the East, China seized the opportunity.
With the U.S. distracted and NVIDIA dismembered, Beijing quietly accelerated its push for silicon sovereignty. Companies like Huawei, Biren and Cambricon — already forced to decouple from the U.S. ecosystem — filled the vacuum with a sense of urgency that bordered on desperation.
Within two years, China rolled out its own GPU-based training clusters. They weren’t as efficient as NVIDIA’s — but they were good enough. Backed by massive state subsidies, China’s “Red Silicon” initiative offered domestic AI labs compute on par with mid-tier American startups.
For countries in Africa, Latin America and parts of the Middle East, where sanctions and high costs made U.S. AI infrastructure inaccessible, China’s solution looked attractive.
The dream turned darker.
The AI Allies Left Behind
With NVIDIA gone, U.S. allies in Europe, Israel and Southeast Asia found themselves stranded. Who could they trust for cutting-edge AI silicon? Intel was still years behind. AMD was better at gaming GPUs than enterprise AI. Qualcomm? Focused on mobile. Google and Amazon hoarded their in-house chips. Meta couldn’t even build a GPU without memes and a three-year roadmap leak.
Even open source initiatives, like RISC-V and OpenAI’s Triton compiler, struggled to scale without a stable backend hardware partner. The “NVIDIA tax” was gone — but so were the performance gains.
Everyone talked about open AI, open compute and open silicon. But the reality was fragmentation, friction and failure to launch.
Jensen’s Heartbreak
In the dream, Jensen wandered through what used to be his company: Half-built fabs, empty labs, shattered silicon and billboards promoting “AltCompute” — a Bezos-backed GPU-as-a-Service startup running on half-rate ASICs.
He wasn’t angry. He was heartbroken.
He sat down on a rusted rack server and whispered, “We had the lead. We had the team. We were building the future.”
There was no reply. Only a cold breeze whistled through the data center ruins.
The Click of the Heels
Suddenly, a beam of light.
Jensen blinked and found himself back in his bed. Around him stood Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella.
“You wouldn’t believe the dream I just had,” Jensen said, sweat still beading on his forehead. “They broke us up. We lost the lead. China took over. It was… it was horrible.”
The room went quiet.
Then they all laughed. Too loud. Too quickly.
Bezos patted him on the back, “Relax, Jensen. It was just a dream.”
Sam Altman gave a twitchy grin. “Yeah. Totally impossible.”
Zuckerberg tried to make a joke about “breaking things being cool again,” but no one laughed.
And Satya? He just stared out the window, lost in thought.
Because deep down, they all knew: In this moment, with this much at stake, there’s no place like… NVIDIA.
Click. Click. Click.
About the Author:
Alan Shimel is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Techstrong Group. He’s been writing about technology, innovation and the future for over two decades. While he hasn’t dreamt of Jensen Huang in a field of corn yet, he’s keeping his eye on the winds of change.
