Biden’s pro-competition agenda put to the test as net neutrality, tech trials take shape

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2 years ago

September 29, 2023

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U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks prior to signing an executive order on “promoting competition in the American economy” during an event in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington U.S., July 9, 2021.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Joe Biden has positioned himself as a pro-competition president, delighting progressives by installing their wish list of liberal antitrust enforcers early in his administration.

But this fall, his digital competition agenda will truly be put to the test, as the first of the government’s tech anti-monopoly cases is finally argued in federal court.

Tuesday marked a convergence of several long-awaited actions in competition policy and enforcement. First, the Federal Trade Commission announced its long-awaited antitrust suit against Amazon. Shortly after that, the Federal Communications Commission chair announced a proposal to reinstate net neutrality rules, which prohibit internet service providers from favoring certain websites over others.

At the same time, the Department of Justice has been litigating its own monopolization suit against Google in Washington, D.C. District Court, three years after the initial complaint was filed during the last administration. The Justice Department’s second antitrust challenge against Google is set to go to trial early next year.

During Biden’s presidency, plenty of ink has been spilled over his antitrust enforcers’ boundary-pushing approaches, particularly as they eyed deals and potential misconduct in the tech industry. But until this month, none of the federal tech monopoly trials had kicked off.

Before the swearing in of Democrat Anna Gomez this week, the FCC had been deadlocked, unable to move forward with any measures that couldn’t gain the support of at least one of its Republican commissioners.

Antitrust cases and government rulemaking are famous for their often long timelines. But with all of these actions now set in motion, Americans are one step closer to seeing how the Biden administration’s competition vision plays out.

Tim Wu, who previously served in the White House as a key architect of the Biden administration’s competition agenda, said in an interview that many of the seeds planted early in the administration, if not yet bearing fruit, are at least “sprouting.”

Wu said that in the early days of his time at the White House, the administration came up with what was called the “grand unified theory of antitrust revival.” It included appointing strong enforcers and starting the White House Competition Council.

Biden laid out his competition goals in an executive order issued in 2021, which urged the FCC to restore net neutrality rules and for the FTC to “challenge prior bad mergers,” among other things.

Since the time of the executive order, Hannah Garden-Monheit, director of Competition Council policy at the White House, said those principles have “built up a lot of momentum” and have “become embedded and institutionalized in the work of the government.”

Even as several prongs of competition policy take shape, the Biden administration is up against the clock. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, the administration faces the possibility of losing its chance to follow through on some of the actions it has spearheaded.

That timeline may be particularly concerning for the ability to implement and uphold net neutrality rules, given that the FCC didn’t have a Democratic majority able to advance the rulemaking until just this week. Wu and other net neutrality advocates have blamed the telecom industry for opposing Biden’s initial FCC nominee, Gigi Sohn, holding up her nomination for well over a year until she ultimately withdrew. (CNBC parent company NBCUniversal is owned by internet service provider Comcast.)

Gigi Sohn testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing examining her nomination to be appointed Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission on February 9, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Peter Marovich | Getty Images

Biden’s unwillingness to pivot to another candidate earlier also meant the FCC remained deadlocked for the first half of his term as president.

Still, Wu said that backing down from a qualified candidate is “not Biden’s style.”

No matter when the administration changes hands, Wu said he’s confident that net neutrality can prevail. He called the repeal of the rules under Trump’s FCC an “outlier” and believes Republicans have nothing to gain at this point in pushing for repeal.

“I think about Republicans — they don’t like Google, Facebook doing censorship — and they really don’t like their cable company doing it either,” Wu said. “There’s no constituency right now for the repeal of net neutrality.”

At the FTC, Chair Lina Khan finally moved ahead in filing the agency’s antitrust suit against Amazon, accusing it of illegally maintaining a monopoly by punishing sellers that offer lower prices elsewhere and “effectively” requiring them to use Amazon’s fulfillment services. Amazon’s general counsel has called the suit “wrong on the facts and the law.”

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Oversight of the Federal Trade Commission, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., July 13, 2023.

Kevin Wurm | Reuters

“This complaint focused on behaviors that courts have in the past found clearly to be violations of the antitrust laws,” Bill Baer, who has served as the top antitrust official at both the FTC and DOJ in different Democratic administrations, said. “She didn’t need to include theories where the courts either haven’t reached or about which they’ve been more skeptical in the past.”

Wu said the more narrow approach didn’t surprise him, in part because Khan is “more restrained than people think she is.”

“Frankly, it’s not exotic at all,” Wu said of the Amazon complaint. “It’s plain vanilla, Main Street, what we would call a consumer welfare case.”

While Khan and Jonathan Kanter, her counterpart at the DOJ, have said they aim to bring cases that they can win, they have indicated they’re also willing to bring riskier complaints to push the boundaries of the law.

“They’re adopting more of a baseball approach than a perfectionist approach,” Wu said. “And if you have someone who’s batting .500, .700, that’s a pretty good hitter, especially if they’re swinging for home runs.”

“It is a critical moment in the courts deciding how the antitrust laws apply to Big Tech,” Baer said. “The results of these pending and future cases will tell us a lot about what the rules of the road are going forward.”

Advocates of reforming antitrust laws have said that it’s important for Congress to clarify the law, but antitrust reform has stalled in Congress after a major push last year fizzled out.

Wu said a key “uncompleted part” of the grand master plan in the White House was appointing more antitrust enforcement-minded judges.

In 10 years, Garden-Monheit said she thinks Americans will look back at this moment “as a real inflection point” where the president opted to turn the page on “40 years of laissez-faire, trickle-down economics, lax enforcement of antitrust laws.”

“I hope that’s the direction that we’ll continue to see for decades going forward, just like we’ve turned the page on decades of past failed approach,” Garden-Monheit said.

“Win or lose, we don’t know what will happen in any of these cases,” Wu said. “But I think we’ll look back at this and say that non-enforcement was just a blip.”

WATCH: FTC files lawsuit against Amazon. Here’s how to play the stock

Technology

Nvidia’s new ‘robot brain’ goes on sale for $3,499 as company targets robotics for growth

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1 hour ago

August 25, 2025

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Nvidia's new 'robot brain' goes on sale for ,499 as company targets robotics for growth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia announced Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.

The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.

After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module.

CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to the Nvidia’s overall sales more than tripling in the past two years.

“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.

The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia’s current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games.

Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models.

Companies including Agility Robotics, Amazon, Meta and Boston Dynamics are using its Jetson chips, Nvidia said. Nvidia has also invested in robotics companies such as Field AI.

However, robotics remains a small business for Nvidia, accounting for about 1% of the company’s total revenue, despite the fact that it has launched several new robot chips since 2014. But it’s growing fast.

Nvidia recently combined its business units to group its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. That unit reported $567 million in quarterly sales in May, which represented a 72% increase on an annual basis.

The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that’s been tuned for automotive purposes.

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Technology

Intel says Trump deal has risks for shareholders, international sales

Published

1 hour ago

August 25, 2025

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Intel says Trump deal has risks for shareholders, international sales

Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan speaks at the company’s Annual Manufacturing Technology Conference in San Jose, California, U.S. April 29, 2025.

Laure Andrillon | Reuters

Intel on Monday warned of “adverse reactions” from investors, employees and others to the Trump administration taking a 10% stake in the company, in a filing citing risks involved with the deal.

A key concern area is international sales, with 76% of Intel’s revenue in its last fiscal year coming from outside the U.S., according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company had $53.1 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024, down 2% from the year prior.

For Intel’s international customers, the company is now directly tied to President Donald Trump‘s ever-shifting tariff and trade policies.

“There could be adverse reactions, immediately or over time, from investors, employees, customers, suppliers, other business or commercial partners, foreign governments or competitors,” the company wrote in the filing. “There may also be litigation related to the transaction or otherwise and increased public or political scrutiny with respect to the Company.”

Intel also said that the potential for a changing political landscape in Washington could challenge or void the deal and create risks to current and future shareholders.

The deal, which was announced Friday, gives the Department of Commerce up to 433.3 million shares of the company, which is dilutive to existing shareholders. The purchase of shares is being funded largely by money already awarded to Intel under President Joe Biden‘s CHIPS Act.

Nvidia faces Wall Street’s high expectations two years into AI boom

Published

2 hours ago

August 25, 2025

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Nvidia faces Wall Street's high expectations two years into AI boom

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

It’s been two years since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence started to transform Nvidia’s business. Since then, the chipmaker’s revenue has more than tripled and profits have quadrupled.

Nvidia‘s fiscal second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for Wednesday, will mark the second anniversary of growth, as the company shifted from being known as a maker of gaming chips to its current position at the heart of the technology industry.

Last month, Nvidia became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap, and it’s continued to appreciate in value. Since the end of 2022, around the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT and sparked the generative AI boom, Nvidia’s stock price is up twelvefold. It’s up 33% this year, closing on Friday at $177.99.

Growth is still substantial for a company Nvidia’s size, but it has slowed dramatically. After five straight quarters of triple-digit expansion in 2023 and 2024, revenue growth dipped to 69% in the fiscal first quarter this year. Nvidia is expected to report a year-over-year jump of 53% to $45.9 billion in its second-quarter report, according to LSEG’s consensus of analyst estimates.

Data center revenue in the first quarter accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s total sales, the clearest sign of how significant AI has become to its business. The company said that 34% of total sales last year came from three unnamed customers. Analysts say Nvidia’s top end users are major internet companies and cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

“The assumptions and performance of Nvidia really dictates what the market is going to start to price into the AI trade, and that whole AI trade has essentially been driving the market this past year,” said Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha Research at S&P Global, which aggregates Wall Street research.

Nvidia makes up about 7.5% of the S&P 500.

Tech’s megacap companies, other than Nvidia, reported quarterly results in late July, updating Wall Street on their investment plans. In all, they’re looking to spend roughly $320 billion on AI technology and data center buildouts this year.

OpenAI, which is still private but has a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, says it will team up with SoftBank and Oracle to spend $500 billion over the next four years on the Stargate project, which President Donald Trump announced in January.

Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, displays the new Blackwell GPU chip during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2024.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Analysts say about half of AI capital spending ends up with Nvidia. The company’s reliance on the so-called hyperscalers leaves it vulnerable to changes in the macroeconomic environment and in the artificial intelligence industry, which remains hard to predict.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week that he believes “investors as a whole are overexcited about AI,” and even said it could be a “bubble.”

But don’t expect a pullback yet. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC on Wednesday that the company “constantly” doesn’t have enough computing power.

As always, Wall Street will be paying close attention to Nvidia’s guidance and other forward-looking commentary from CEO Jensen Huang. For the fiscal third quarter, analysts are expecting revenue growth of 50% to $52.7 billion, according to LSEG. If Nvidia guides higher and tops estimates for the second quarter, analysts say that kind of “beat and raise” could drive AI optimism even higher.

Blackwell ramp

The most important offering from Nvidia is its Blackwell line, which includes individual graphics processing units and entire systems tying together 72 GPUs.

Strong Blackwell numbers would affirm Nvidia’s continuing technological lead and foothold among its key customers, said Ryuta Makino, an analyst at Gamco Investors, which has a stake in the company.

“It solidifies that hyperscaler spending is still very strong with the Blackwell ramp,” Makino said.

Nvidia said in May that its new product line reached $27 billion in sales, accounting for about 70% of data center revenue. That’s a steep increase from $11 billion in the prior quarter.

As more Blackwell chips get installed, experts anticipate that their superior computing power will enable companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to create even more capable AI models. OpenAI’s GPT-5, which was announced earlier this month, was trained on Nvidia’s last-generation Hopper chips, not the newer Blackwell processors.

Nvidia said last year that Blackwell would be limited by supply — how many chips its partners can build and ship — and not by demand.

Blackwell Ultra is expected to start shipping in the second half of 2025. Nvidia recently pushed back on an analyst report from Asia that said Rubin, the chip technology expected to comprise the bulk of GPU sales in 2027, was seeing early production problems.

One visible sign of Nvidia’s rise is Huang’s worldwide fame. He’s regularly name-checked by Trump and during the quarter traveled to meet with business leaders and officials in Taiwan, China, Germany, England and Saudi Arabia.

Huang recently struck a deal with Trump to regain access to the Chinese market. Nvidia will pay 15% of its China chip revenue to the U.S. government in exchange for licenses to export its China-focused AI chip called the H20, Trump said this month. The president added that he’d asked for 20%, but Huang bargained him down.

The H20 is worth a lot to Nvidia. The chip would have contributed about $8 billion in sales in the second quarter, Nvidia said in May, before the U.S. government said it would require a license to ship it to China, effectively shutting off sales.

Nvidia did not include any H20 sales in its guidance for the second quarter, and analysts doubt that it will include any in its forecast for the current period, partially because the Chinese government is pressuring its cloud providers to use homegrown chips from companies such as Huawei.

If H20 is included in guidance, it could boost revenue expectations by about $2 billion to $3 billion, according to analysts at KeyBanc, who recommend buying the stock. But they said they expect Nvidia to completely exclude it, following Advanced Micro Devices’ lead from early August.

“Additionally, given a potential 15% tax on AI exports and pressure from the China government for its AI providers to use domestic AI chips, we expect management to guide conservatively,” the KeyBanc analysts wrote.

Nvidia is working on a new China AI chip based on Blackwell that would also likely need the president’s approval.

“I’m sure he’s pitching the president all the time,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said about Huang last week on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

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