CHIPS act failure? Blame NVIDIA.

It was surprising today to see the news of a brand new Antitrust probe against NVIDIA. What exactly might this be about? One answer might be that it’s primary competitor, Intel, has announced a pending potential split from it’s foundry business and retained Goldman Sachs to support.

There is a little bit of a problem here given that we are in the home stretch of a high contentious election. A primary objective of the Biden administration has been to preserve domestic semiconductor manufacturing via the CHIPS act.

If Intel were to break apart within 60 days of the November election, this would cast a shadow over the effectiveness of the CHIPS act — adding an unpleasant color to the current administration resulting in a rather inconvenient news cycle heading into the voting season.

One potential strategy to get ahead of the news? Accuse NVIDIA of antitrust behavior. Reading through the currently available talking points — I am not able to find anything substantive other than “NVIDIA’s chips are really good.”

Being highly competent, hiring and leading an elite team, making long term plans (founding and sticking with the CUDA platform for decades) and winning big is not “antitrust,” it is competent leadership and execution.

I am a little worried about this announcement — I suspect, based on having worked at several of these companies, that we are seeing a pre-emptive effort to cover for the breakup of a major American semiconductor company which was supposed to be protected by the CHIPS act.

That looks bad, maybe blaming NVIDIA (for being competent) for Intel’s failure (and the failure of the CHIPS act) might provide a little bit of air cover leading into the election. Unless I see more concerning details from this probe, it seems rather suspicious.