Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s zipping up his black leather Tom Ford jacket as his relationship with the Trump administration gets chilly.

A House committee focused on national security opened an investigation into Nvidia this week, probing the chip companies’ sales to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. Also this week, Huang is said to have taken his PJ to Beijing, where the Financial Times reported he met with DeepSeek’s founder.

It’s the latest escalation in a tiff between the US and Nvidia, as the federal government tries to prevent China from getting its hands on semiconductors it says could be used to build military supercomputers.

Nvidia’s Un-Enviable Month

The US government told Nvidia earlier this month that it must get a license to sell H20 chips to Chinese companies, the chipmaker disclosed on Tuesday.

Nvidia’s stock slid after it said the requirement means its first-quarter earnings will take a $5.5 billion hit. The H20 chip, the most advanced AI chip Nvidia is allowed to sell in China, generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion for the company last year. Nvidia is said to have already had $18 billion in orders penciled in this year.

The gist is that it isn’t easy to break up with the world’s second-largest economy:

• China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest market behind the US, Singapore, and Taiwan, with Beijing bringing in $17 billion of revenue last year or 13% of the company’s total.
• Nvidia has been steadily losing sales in the country as restrictions ramp up; two years ago, China accounted for more than a quarter of its revenue.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has been bobbing and weaving to comply with US export curbs. The company built two chips to meet Biden-era requirements that have since been added to the no-ship list. DeepSeek said it used one of those chips, along with H20s, to build its AI model. The Commerce Department is investigating whether DeepSeek also tapped advanced Nvidia chips it smuggled in from other countries.

An underground market for the chips has cropped up in China, with Reuters reporting in January that China’s government and military have both bought Nvidia’s top-of-the-line chips via other countries since export bans kicked in.

Curbed Enthusiasm: The H20 is one of the less powerful chips in Nvidia’s lineup, far less advanced than the A100 and the H100, which are used by companies like Meta and OpenAI. Going after the weakest link in Nvidia’s lineup would essentially stop all of the company’s AI-related sales to China, according to Stratechery (gaming chips are still allowed for now). At the same time, an H20 ban could boost sales for Chinese chip-makers like Huawei, which have churned out their own advanced AI chips in recent years to fill the market gap left by Nvidia. Between underground workarounds and the rise of rival tech, it’s unclear how effective export curbs have been at limiting China’s AI advances.

After the tireless, incredible work by the scientists involved, the marketing team will barely have to lift a finger to come up with something catchier than orforglipron, as the company’s potentially game-changing drug has been dubbed.

Eli Lilly announced trial results Thursday that suggested the experimental pill for diabetes and weight loss is just as effective as rival Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster injectable diet drug Ozempic. The company plans to seek regulatory approval for the treatment by the end of the year, which would make it the first orally administered GLP-1 treatment to hit the market in a massive medical and financial breakthrough.

Pill, Baby, Pill

The anti-obesity drug market could grow to $100 billion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs, and is already well on its way there. Anti-obesity medications are now prescribed to 6% of Americans, a figure that has doubled every year since 2019. Eli Lilly and its chief rival Novo Nordisk sold over $40 billion worth of so-called GLP-1 drugs last year, with Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo’s Ozempic among the buzziest medical breakthroughs in recent years, creating fodder for celebrity tabloids and material for Saturday Night Live.

GLP-1 treatments mimic a gut hormone that reduces appetite by slowing digestion and increasing insulin release, thus helping with weight loss. But so far they have one major obstacle to adoption: fear. Current GLP-1 offerings are delivered by injection, creating a potential barrier to some customers, as roughly a quarter of US adults are afraid of needles.

Hence the importance of the trial for Lilly’s GLP-1 pill: Participants’ weight fell by 16 pounds, or 7.9%, on average at the highest dose in 40 weeks, comparable to using Novo’s injectable Ozempic for the same amount of time. For Lilly, the potential game-changer led to a historic stock jump, while its main competitor was left with one tough pill to swallow:

• Lilly’s shares rose 14% Thursday, good enough for the best one-day percentage increase since 2000. The trial was focused on diabetes patients, which GLP-1s can also be used to treat, and late-stage study results regarding patients with obesity are expected later this year, which could bring more good news.
• Rival Novo Nordisk has been under pressure since March when the second late-stage trial of its next-generation obesity drug candidate CagriSema proved disappointing and no better than Lilly’s Mounjaro. Novo shed about 7% Thursday — not the good, GLP-1 drug-fueled kind of shedding, either, and its market cap has slimmed down more than 50% over the past year.

Lilly CEO David Ricks hinted that the pill could avoid the supply chain pitfalls of injectable GLP-1s which, coupled with strong demand, led to shortages of Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo’s Ozempic in recent years. In a statement, he said orforglipron “could be readily manufactured and launched at scale for use by people around the world.”

Weighing the Cost: It’s not clear what the price tag on Lilly’s pill would be, but affordability has been a major concern in the GLP-1 space. More than half, or 54%, of adults who have taken one of the drugs told a poll by KFF Health last year that they found it difficult to afford them — brand-name versions can cost more than $1,000 per month without insurance.

How does the US government enforce antitrust law against Big Tech? To paraphrase a quote sometimes attributed to Ernest Hemingway: slowly (or not at all) for 20 years, and then all at once.

A US judge ruled on Thursday that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in parts of the digital advertising ecosystem, just eight months after another judge found the company held an illegal monopoly in the search market last September. The decision could reshape the economy of the internet — and it’s just one of several forces testing Google’s suddenly much more fragile empire.

Google’s Invisible Hand

Google’s ad tech business, which facilitates ad placements on third-party sites across the web (such as news sites or recipe pages), is a three-pronged operation: one prong offers publishers a tool for displaying ads on their websites, one prong offers advertisers a tool for buying such ad space, and the other prong is an exchange that facilitates the split-second auctions for the entire operation. Web publishers have long complained that Google effectively forces the “tying” of these services together — e.g., using the publisher tool requires using the exchange tool — and thus Google uses its leverage to extract unfairly high fees.

On Thursday, a US district judge agreed (though said the government failed to prove a monopoly in the advertiser side of the equation). For publishers and creators who rely on internet ad revenue — some of whom, including News Corp and Gannett, testified as witnesses in the trial — the ruling is likely a major win.

For Google, it’s just the latest challenge to its once ironclad grip on the internet economy:

• Advertising accounted for about 75% of Google’s total $350 billion of revenue last year, with its ad tech business accounting for nearly 9% of total revenue. As part of the case, the Department of Justice recommended that the judge order Google to divest pieces of the ad tech business, which could potentially threaten tens of billions of dollars of annual revenue.
• Google’s search side of the business may also shrink soon due to looming judgments from the company’s other lost monopoly case. It’s also starting to face more organic competition: Udayan Bose, founder and CEO of digital growth marketing agency and Google Premier Partner NetElixir, told The Daily Upside that his clients have seen an 8% drop in search traffic since the arrival of AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

Over the Garden Wall: While Thursday’s ruling is being seen by most as a win for publishers and creators, one consequence could be a smaller internet. Google “will have no other option but to just double down on its effort to create the ‘walled gardens,’” Bose said. With a likely reduced ability to monetize eyeballs on third-party sites run by publishers and creators, Google will be incentivized to “really keep people within the Google ecosystem” that consists of “about six to seven of Google properties, like YouTube or Gmail, with more than a billion active users.” Rest assured, it launched an ad placement service in 2021 for advertisers, called Performance Max, which uses AI to place ads across the Google ecosystem — be it YouTube, Maps, or elsewhere. And, per Bose, the cost per click for advertisers has ticked up about 27% each year since its launch.