Fortune Editors It became personal

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg departs federal court in Washington, D.C. on April 15, 2025. (Photo: Allison Robbert/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Seven years ago Mark Zuckerberg wrote to senior leaders at the company formerly known as Facebook that he believed it would be broken up in the next five to 10 years.

Why not get ahead of the regulatory scrutiny?

“I’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals,” the Meta CEO wrote. (One of them: “Stop artificially growing Instagram in a way that undermines the Facebook network.”)

The note emerged during the second day of a federal antitrust trial. 

The Federal Trade Commission alleges Meta’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 gave it a social media monopoly that should be broken up; Meta contends it’s no monopoly in light of the success of TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube, and even Apple’s iMessage.

The FTC began its investigation of the company in 2019 and sued in 2020. Zuckerberg reportedly tried to head off the trial last month with a proposal for a $450 million settlement; the FTC had demanded $30 billion.

So far, the trial has focused on how Zuckerberg defined and reacted to the competitive landscape—from Path to Foursquare to Instagram—in the first half of the previous decade. 

In court this week, Zuckerberg said his communications back then attempted to “take into account the direction that the politics seemed to be going at the time.” The CEO testified that he was focused on increasing revenue at Instagram, which at the time was a small fraction of Meta’s overall revenue.

Zuckerberg is expected to return to the stand Wednesday to be questioned by Meta’s lawyers; former COO Sheryl Sandberg should follow later in the week. —AN

Nvidia said Tuesday that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion related to the export of its H20 AI chip to China and other countries.

Though the H20 is not Nvidia’s flagship AI chip—that title goes to the B200, based on the Blackwell architecture—it’s the most powerful GPU allowed for sale in China. It’s based on the older Hopper architecture and is similar to the H100 and H200 chips available here.

According to a company filing, the U.S. government told Nvidia a week ago that it would need a license to export the chips to China and elsewhere. 

That requirement, which comes alongside myriad new export restrictions on semiconductors, threatens to weigh on Nvidia’s historic trajectory amid the current AI investment boom.

CNBC notes that the H20 is estimated to have generated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.

During a February call with investors, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that competition in China was proliferating (cough, Huawei, cough) as its revenue declined. China is Nvidia’s fourth largest market by sales. —AN

Social networks, so hot right now!

OpenAI, the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence company, is developing its own text-based social network, according to a report by The Verge. 

Though the project “is still in early stages” and there’s “an internal prototype,” CEO Sam Altman has already been “asking outsiders for feedback,” according to the report. 

Altman, of course, famously had a falling out with his fellow OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, who bought X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, in 2022. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he took that personally, but there’s something to be said for creating a more natural distribution mechanism for ChatGPT (which, please note, was the most downloaded app in the world last month, per Appfigures).

The alleged move also pits OpenAI more directly against consumer Big Tech companies like Google and Meta who are keen to integrate homegrown AI to their existing user bases and product ecosystems. —AN