EU Investigates GPU Market Abuse in Wake of Nvidia Office Raid

Nvidia
(Image credit: Nvidia)

The European Commission has informally started to gather opinions on potential unfair practices related to the GPUs used for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, Bloomberg reports. The investigators are trying to determine if there is a need for subsequent action, which is a formal investigation. The report follows a police raid in Nvidia's office in Paris in connection with potential antitrust actions 'in the graphics card industry.'

Nvidia's GPUs have become indispensable for large-scale AI model training and inference. Bloomberg says that Nvidia's H100 processing units have enabled Nvidia to secure over 80% of the market, outstripping competitors like Intel and AMD. If these initial probes culminate in a formal EU antitrust investigation and Nvidia is found guilty, the company could face substantial penalties that could account for 10% of its global annual revenue. In Nvidia's case, that would be billions of dollars.

The EU's probe stems from concerns about anticompetitive behaviors in the burgeoning AI chip arena. Nvidia, which literally sells tons of compute GPUs for artificial intelligence workloads, is naturally at the heart of these formal and informal investigations. The European Commission is in the preliminary stages of collating information, trying to ascertain if there's enough ground to warrant a more in-depth, formal inquiry. 

Meanwhile, France appears to be running a parallel probe. The French authorities are particularly keen on understanding Nvidia's predominant role, its pricing strategies, and the repercussions of the ongoing chip shortage on pricing. The alignment of the EU and French investigations underscores the gravity of the concerns surrounding Nvidia's market conduct.

Nvidia's ascendancy in the AI chip market has been meteoric yet predictable as it has invested billions of dollars in optimizing its CUDA software framework for AI applications well ahead of its rivals. This, along with the performance offered by Nvidia's A100 and H100 processing units, has not only cemented Nvidia's position in the AI landscape (especially in training sophisticated large language models) but also pushed them well ahead of tech giants like Intel and AMD. 

This dominant market position, while a testament to Nvidia's innovation and ability to make bets on the right technologies, is now under the microscope due to potential antitrust implications.

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • bourgeoisdude
    But...what did they do wrong? Get there first? Are they just too successful? I don't see any specific charges here.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    Admin said:
    Following police raid in Nvidia's police office, EU starts investigating AI processor market.

    EU Investigates GPU Market Abuse in Wake of Nvidia Office Raid : Read more
    Man, nvidia has their own police office?! They are bigger than we thought...
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    TerryLaze said:
    Man, nvidia has their own police office?! They are bigger than we thought...
    You think Nvidia didn't see what the EU did to Intel and Microsoft? You didn't need one of Nvidia's AI supercomputers to predict this was going to happen.
    Reply
  • Kamen Rider Blade
    It took them long enough!

    They should've investigated nVIDIA years ago.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    spongiemaster said:
    You think Nvidia didn't see what the EU did to Intel and Microsoft? You didn't need one of Nvidia's AI supercomputers to predict this was going to happen.
    Huh?! I just found it funny that the OP had the mistake in it making it seem as if nvidia has a police office.
    Reply
  • Sluggotg
    I remember when some European Countries made Microsoft include everyone else's Web Browsers in with Windows because it was "unfair" that it only included Explorer. The Governments said the average person was not capable of buying or downloading, then installing the software. ( Installing software is kind of a thing in the computer world).

    A lot of successful companies get extorted by governments. Especially if it is a foreign company.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    bourgeoisdude said:
    what did they do wrong?
    i mean nearly everyone would say they are being way too greedy since pandemic .

    not related to the reason probably but nobody wants a monopoly for anything.

    Its very bad in everything as that gives said entity basically 100% control of it.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    Does this count as a fishing expedition?
    Reply
  • Dantte
    Remember when the government fined a company for "unfair" practices, then turned around and gave the money back to the people who were "unfairly" treated??? Oh wait, thats not how this works...

    Heres how it really works, government fines companies, takes the money and our elected officials become part of the highest class in our society. The average Joe gets doubled screwed because they were "unfairly" treated in the first place, and then those companies that get fined, jack up their prices on the next round of goods passing the fine onto the people!
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    TerryLaze said:
    Huh?! I just found it funny that the OP had the mistake in it making it seem as if nvidia has a police office.
    I know. I was joking. Nvidia isn't putting a police station in their office to fend off a gov't search raid.
    Reply