Trump Wants Big Tech to Pay for Power

25:10We estimate in our research that costs have declined by 30 times over the past five years, from$3 million per unit to$100 ,000 per unit. And this means that the economics are getting optically more attractive. The use cases are expanding. And hence, I think that the investment opportunity is also becoming more real. and stronger. Right. Very quickly, Zanitsa, who's ahead? We have 15 seconds, China or the United States here? I think it's going to be a tough competition. I think for the moment, it's China. This is where we see most of the robots being deployed. But I think the US is quickly catching up.

25:49Zanitsa Tararova of Barclays, who again out this week with the forecast that Humanoid will be a$200 billion market by 2035. Thank you so much for joining us on the program. Now coming up, an important conversation. We're going to be joined by the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission to discuss antitrust, consumer protection, and AI regulation. A lot has happened this week with regards to the FTC, a conversation also about acquahires, which in the technology industry was a mainstay story of 2025. That conversation is next. This is what your markets look like, flat at the index level, outperformance in chips.

26:27This is Bloomberg Tech.

26:40Welcome to our Bloomberg TV and radio audiences around the world. A recurring theme of recent tech M &A has been deals to bring in talent in so-called aqua hires. The Federal Trade Commission is taking notice. One member of the FTC warned Thursday that these, quote, creative deal structures could raise antitrust concerns. Let's discuss and delighted to welcome Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the FTC, to the program. We cover the topic of acquahires on Bloomberg Tech regularly. It was a mainstay story in 2025. When does a talent deal stop being a talent deal and become more than that, become a merger?

27:22What are the rules-based approach that the FTC would take, Chairman, to look at that? Yeah, so we are examining, look, acquihires have been around, especially in the sort of startup founder space for a long time. And they've gotten bigger basically in the last admin. and a lot of people were of the view that these things were sort of being constructed in these big deals to try to escape Hart Scott Rodino review, which is pre-merger antitrust review in the United States, because the Biden administration was trying to block all deals, and I think generally they were. That isn't necessary anymore.

28:01We don't need clever workarounds around antitrust review anymore, because at the FTC under the Trump administration, you get a fair shake. I'm not saying your deal will go through. I've sued to block several deals this year, and I've won those cases. But if your deal is not illegal, we get out of the way and sort of let the market take care of things. So we are beginning to examine that the HSR Act has a provision that says you're not allowed to structure deals in order to escape pre-merger review. And so we are beginning to examine these acquihires to make sure that they aren't an attempt to get around HSR review.

28:38But the message I want to send sort of to Silicon Valley and to the M &A infrastructure generally is you don't need to structure deals as a clever attempt to get around pre-merger review. You'll get a fair shake at the FTC. Deal may not go through, but if your deal is legal, I will get out of your way very quickly. And if it's not, I'll take you to court and I'll fight to win there. We're not going to let the process be the punishment anymore. But, you know, it is important to us to make sure that people aren't going to use clever deal structures to get around pre-merger review. The language of clever or creative deal structures that I cited at the beginning of our conversation was from your colleague and fellow commissioner, Mark Mador, right, who was speaking at a conference in California yesterday.

29:24I think what the industry hopes to understand from you is what the threshold is or what the set of rules would be where a hiring proposal situation should be reported to antitrust authorities. It should be, yeah, as simple as that. It should be by rope reported. Yeah. And, you know, we are beginning to examine how these deals work. acqui-hire deal structures vary from deal to deal. And so there wouldn't necessarily be a sort of a one-size-fits-all rule. But we are beginning to examine these big acqui-hire deals that raise a lot of attention so that we can understand when an acqui-hire is in fact an acquisition that might be covered by the pre-merger review laws.

30:12And when it's not, and we need to understand them before we're sort of out there telling people what the rules are. But this is, you're right, this has become a big enough deal that we are beginning to look very closely at how these things work, including determining whether we need to promulgate additional guidance here in the coming months about how we understand these acqui-hires. Is there a factor that matters more to you? The number of employees hired or putting a value on the intellectual capital or the competitive advantage that such a transaction would give the acquirer? so the value that matters for hsr is set by the statute that's not really here or there but the hsr act applies to um deals where assets or stock are being purchased and that's what triggers hsr review and so what we need to understand um which is why we're beginning to examine this question now is when does an acquihire you know involve the sale of the acquisition of assets or stock in a way that would trigger the statute.

31:17Look, at the end of the day, I'm a lawyer and a law enforcer, and I enforce statutes, and those statutes have texts. And so it's my job to understand whether things happening in the marketplace trigger the text that Congress has actually passed for us. But that's what we're looking at. We're not trying to set sort of, we wouldn't be setting like acquihire rules generally. We would be looking at deals and trying to understand, does this in fact involve the acquisition or sale of assets or stock? and is anything being structured as an attempt to circumvent review. But I'm not here to say this is what the rules are.

31:50There will be hard and fast, clear rules. There aren't even for the ordinary deals. We've got the HSR Act and the HSR rules, but deal structures even in ordinary M &A vary widely. And so we have to apply the text that Congress actually wrote to specific deals. But acquihires have become frequent enough and large enough that we are beginning to look at the appropriate way to apply the law that Congress actually adopted to acquihires. It's not my job as an enforcer to sort of fit square pegs into round holes, but it is my job to make sure that the will of Congress, which is the will of the people at the end of the day, is being followed, and that's what we're here to try to do.

32:29We're trying to figure out how that applies in the case of acquihires. Chairman, how common is this in the field of artificial intelligence, or how often is this particular scenario arising and crossing your desk from the AI industry? We've seen a couple in the last 12 months. My understanding is that the act we hire sort of structure, if you want to call it that, where a firm acquires a lot of the talent in another firm is pretty old, has been going on for a long time, but it often involves very small firms. And I think the reason that a lot of people are starting to notice it is because now it involves much larger firms and the sort of price being attached to obtaining the talent into licensing IP is in the billions.

33:18So I've definitely seen a couple in the AI space this year, which is what has attracted a lot of the attention. And it's why we're beginning to try to examine how are these working and how does the law that Congress past governing pre-merger review actually apply here, as well as the provision in the pre-merger review law that says you can't structure a deal in order to try to escape HSR review. So that is what we're trying to understand now. But certainly, I mean, you all have reported on them. You can read about them in the Wall Street Journal. It's definitely true that there have been a couple of these big ones in the AI area.

33:57You're live with us on Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Radio around the world. was speaking to Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the FTC. I think the biggest case study of late, just to give an example of the structure, is NVIDIA and Grok. Because what NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Wang, told me a couple of weeks ago is they hired about 400 engineers, but it also included the licensing of the core technology at a$20 billion value, but over a set time horizon. Grok exists as a company still, but with a focus on one of its business lines. that hiring and licensing of technology format. Is there anything specific there, Chairman?

34:37Yeah, so I can't talk about specific deals or specific potential investigations. As a law enforcer, I have to maintain a lot of confidentiality about the work of the commission. But, I mean, that particular structure, the acquihire, was different, for example, from the one that Meta conducted earlier in the year. These things vary pretty wildly. the terms of the software and IP licensing can vary. The number of employees obtained in the transaction can vary. And so we're trying to understand these things, first of all, because the last thing I want to do is sort of blindly charge ahead with a bunch of sort of predetermined assumptions and start trying to apply the law to something we don't understand.

35:23But it is very important to me, because it's very important to Congress, that people not try to come up with ways to attempt to get around pre-merger review. And that's what we're looking at. And again, it's just not necessary. I get why people wanted to do this in the previous administration, where the antitrust enforcers tended to use the process as a way to block deals rather than sort of being a lot more honest about it and taking people to court. But under the Trump administration, we are either going to get out of your way very quickly or we are going to take you to court. We're not letting the process be the punishment.

35:55And so people don't need to try to come up with ways to get around HSR. You will get a fair shake at the FTC. Chairman, there's a lot of interest in the FTC and consumer protection and what the FTC's remit is in the domain of AI. It's an example. I know you won't comment on specific cases, but X and Elon Musk's sex AI and Grok have been in the news because of the use of the tool to generate non-consensual sexualized images. Does the FTC have a role in regulating from a consumer protection standpoint that domain? Yeah, I mean, Congress passed and the president signed in spring of last year the Take It Down Act, which is seminal, groundbreaking legislation to protect people from artificially generated, non-consensual, intimate images.

36:48The criminal component of that law that the Department of Justice enforces is already in effect. The part that we enforce, where we have to compel platforms to take down these images and then bring enforcement actions if they fail will take effect in the spring, we are getting ready for that. I have been meeting with sort of the elite child protection prosecutors and investigators at the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that we're synced up on that mission. this is relatively new to the FTC and I want to make sure we hit the ground running when the authority takes effect right now we are hiring specialists prosecutors, lawyers, investigators and IT experts to enable us the second that this thing takes effect to start bringing enforcement actions wherever these things are happening and I don't care what kind of company you are, if you are a platform whether you're a legacy social media company a burgeoning AI company I don't care, if you are violating the Take It Down Act, you are going to hear from us, and we are going to be ready to do it.

37:46This is incredibly important legislation. I'm really excited that the FTC has a role in this. I lobbied Congress very heavily to make sure that we had enough money to get this program off the ground when it takes effect in the middle of this year. We are getting that money, and we will be ready. Chairman, President Trump has nominated David McNeil to the commission. Our audience have have asked me to ask you your thoughts on that. Someone perhaps without antitrust experience, a legal experience, commission experience, and somebody, you know, frankly, with high net wealth. Your thoughts, please.

38:24Look, I am generally of the view that Washington has too many lawyers. I think it is great that the president has decided to nominate someone who isn't a lawyer, who doesn't sort of think in the pathways that lawyers always think. I think it's great that the president has nominated. I've never met Mr. McNeil. I've talked to him a little since the nomination. The man is a true American patriot. He's created thousands of jobs in this country. He has been one of the most outspoken proponents of manufacturing here in America. That has been one of the president's principal economic priorities is to make sure we make and build things in America.

38:59David McNeil has done that. He has been successful in doing that. And I think it's great that there is gonna be sort of someone with that perspective who isn't coming at this like I am from fancy law schools with a long sort of litigation and law enforcement background. He's coming at it as a job creator, as a wealth creator, and as one of the most outspoken proponents of manufacturing in America that there is in this country. You know, is it an unconventional pick? Yeah, of course it is. But part of what has made President Trump so successful is that he doesn't always think in the conventions that govern D.C.

39:33And I think that this is a really, really good idea to bring someone with Mr. McNeil's perspective here to the commission. Chairman, the major concern for the consumer right now is affordability. What is the FTC able to do on pricing pressure, bringing prices down, addressing that consumer concern? Yeah, I mean, it's one of my main concerns, too. We're doing a lot on this front. On the merger review front, my first two merger enforcement actions were in the health care space. We just won one of those health care enforcement actions last week and several months before. The judge denied our injunction, but only because after I sued them, they offered to divest the assets that were the problem.

40:18So that was a win for the commission as well. Another merger enforcement action I brought is about industrial adhesives that are used to build homes. We have a real home building crisis in this country. Although under President Trump, home sales went up last year for the first time in a while, We still have a home affordability crisis in this country, and I have focused intently on the competition side on making sure that we are active in markets, grocery, healthcare, homes, to try to bring prices down for consumers and to make sure that all Americans get the advantages that come with vigorous competition.

40:53On the other side, I sued Ticketmaster in a groundbreaking lawsuit, charging them with having basically inflated all the prices of tickets in violation of multiple federal laws. Americans have been complaining justly for a long time that it has become almost impossible to take your family to a ballgame or to a concert without having to fork over the value of a mortgage payment to do it. We have been very active in the ticketing space to make sure that those prices are going to come down. We have been bringing actions on the consumer protection side in the health care space. We've also been bringing a lot of consumer protection cases and competition cases to protect the value of wages against non-competes, against job scams.

41:36The FTC is a little agency. Our budget is even half a billion dollars, but we have returned literally billions of dollars of wrongfully taken money just in the last year back in the pockets of the American consumers. We are doing everything we can within our little remit to try to bring down prices and to make this country a more affordable place to live, which is exactly what President Trump has been telling us to do. Chairman, very quickly, Bloomberg's reported that the White House is considering you for a DOJ fraud role. What would that entail? And legally, would it be possible for you to take on that role while remaining chair of the FTC?

42:15I can tell you definitively I'm not leaving the Federal Trade Commission and I'm not going to the Department of Justice. This is an important full-time job that the president entrusted me with to try to help the American people that just voted in their tens of millions to make Donald Trump president. That's what we have done. We've sent billions of dollars of wrongfully taken money back to Americans. And I'm focused on fighting fraud and protecting competition right here at the FTC. Andrew Ferguson, FTC Chairman, thank you for your time here on Bloomberg Tech. Okay, coming up, Germaina Alleman of Prometeo joins us to discuss the future of banking within AI.

42:51That's next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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44:04After TSMC reported huge profits in the fourth quarter, CFO Wendell Huang sat down with Bloomberg Tech's Annabelle Drowlers to affirm his strong conviction in the mega trend of AI demand. He first weighed in on whether the company is prioritizing certain markets as part of his expansion plans. Listen to this. We don't look at it this way. It really depends on customer demand. In the U.S., a lot of customer wants to go there, so we will expand over there. But for the leading edge technologies, it will be in Taiwan because it's a heavy cooperation between the R &D people and operation people for practical reasons.

44:50And leading edge will continue to be led by Taiwan, you think, over the US market, and no changes to that at all, even with you adding a lot more capacity in the States? Yeah, that's for practical reasons. Is it possible, though, to speed up how quickly that advanced tech can be shifted from Taiwan to the States? Yeah, we can try to do that, to shorten the gap. What does that transfer gap look like then? If right now it's several years, Taiwan is ahead, what does that actually look like in the future? We don't have a specific timeline now, but we do, we can try to accelerate that. We think we can try to accelerate.

45:27Could it be shortened to months, do you think? It will be difficult, challenging. Okay, so it stays at least one year behind then. That was TSMC CFO Wendell Huang along with Bloomberg Tech's Annabelle Drowlers. President Trump's call for a 10 % cap on credit card interest rates sent shares of financial firms tumbling this week, with bank CEOs in particular warning the move could harm the economy, not just their bottom lines. Let's talk through it. With Ximena Alaman, co-CEO of Prometeo, which provides technical infrastructure to help corporations connect to financial institutions. I find this very interesting because rate caps also may have an impact on how unsecured credit, and that's the conversation, right, is essentially engineered.

46:15It's also about access, your reaction to the week's events. Okay, so I think that what's most striking about this news is somehow how it has shown the U.S. commerce dependency on credit cards and credit card rails. And so we're talking about 80 % of the population accessing credit through credit cards, plus credit card balance being$1.2 trillion, which I think is a very relevant number because it shows its size is the opportunity, you know, and it's a massive opportunity. opportunity. And so, I think that when we talk about a limitation like this, like a restriction on an intervention on the rates, we are talking about somehow reshaping the infrastructure.

47:05We always tend to think of financial infrastructure as a given, but it's actually designed. And what we are having here is a direct intervention and what basically forces a conversation on the underlying infrastructure and the underlying product. And the conversation is, the question is basically, what needs to happen at the product level in order to meet this constraint, in order to meet this new condition, you know? And so, I think that the question goes to, well, basically, what's the design, you know? Like, what's the shape of the great car system right now? So, at this time, right, Shimea, let me just jump in.

47:42Like, at this time, we're also going to wait and see if this happens, what the behavioral reaction is. So let's say that a section of the economy is closed to the credit card. Well, we spoke to the Klarna CEO earlier this week, right? There's a lot of those that would talk up buy now, pay later, account to account payments. Does that kind of phase out credit card reliance? Well, I think that what will happen is that you have a 1.2 trillion opportunity, you know. And if we talk about the actual shape of the credit card system right now, it's a bundle tool. You have a payment tool plus a credit line tool.

48:21And these two are combined. If we see what has happened in the payment space over the last 10 years is massive disruption, which is basically new entrants, leveraging technology to provide better and most efficient solutions, more cost-effective solutions. And I think that that gives us a glimpse, a clue on what could happen at the credit line infrastructure level. We could expect a movement like that. And that means new entrants, very interested, seeing the size of the opportunity, jumping into the space, leveraging new technology in order to meet the requirements of this demand, because the demand won't go anywhere.

49:03And it's a huge demand. Simena, it was a big week for bank earnings where we hope to find out about how banks are using AI in real terms. A lot of questions to JP Morgan about how much they're spending on AI. But what was your takeaway on the transition, how we go from analysis to the bank's running function using AI? Okay. Well, I think that 2025 marks the year in which AI moved from being an experimentation to full deployment, you know. And I think that's very interesting. Perhaps the most popular initiative was OpenAI's Instant Checkout, powered by Stripe. Definitely, we will see more of that, especially in the financial institutions, banks landscape over this year, you know.

49:53And I think that that will bring a lot of innovation and a lot of news over the incoming year. I think that what we've seen over 2025 is AI becoming an efficient lever and not an innovation toy anymore. And so what financial institutions, banks have done is use AI internally. Initially, it was mostly chatbots, small projects. But what they have noticed is that basically AI can impact the main areas of the financial institution, and especially for banks that have been historically a very silo tech stack, with different parts of the bank having different databases, different technologies, different systems.

50:46AI helps all of this to come together, you know, and work as a comprehensive tech stack, you know. And so now we are seeing initiatives in fraud, in credit, of course, in middle and back office, you know, and creating efficiencies in speed. OK, and this is real time responses to anything that a user can need. Simena Aleman, co-founder, co-CEO of Prometeo. Great summary of the banks in an AI. Thank you very much. That does it for the edition of Bloomberg Tech. What a week it's been. Recap on the pod. You know exactly where to find it. Have a great weekend. This is Bloomberg Tech. This is Caroline Hyde.

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