French antitrust authorities keep an eye on Nivida

According to sources, the integrated circuit manufacturer was searched by French authorities last year on suspicion of anti-competitive practices.

French regulators are reportedly preparing to accuse Nvidia of breaking the country’s competition laws as the company’s value continues to rise.

The world’s largest chipmaker, Nvidia, has benefited enormously from demand for its advanced chips, which underpin the large language models of some of the largest artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI.

Just a few weeks ago, it briefly overtook Apple and Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization. It has since been surpassed by both.

Now, people familiar with the matter have told Reuters that French antitrust authorities want to bring charges against Nvidia for violating antitrust laws.

French authorities reportedly raided the chipmaker in September last year in an unannounced visit and seizure over suspicions it was engaging in “anti-competitive practices.”

The regulator said the raid was linked to a broader focus on the cloud computing sector. It follows a report from a year ago that found Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services dominated the sector and were potentially hampering competition at the time.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia was the target of the raid, while a French media outlet also reported that the raid hit an Nvidia office.

Nvidia achieved a $1 trillion valuation last year thanks to its focus on AI chips and briefly reached the $2 trillion milestone in February. The chipmaker managed to reach a market capitalization of $3.02 trillion early last month.

US regulators are also expected to launch antitrust investigations into Nvidia, as well as Microsoft and OpenAI, to determine the extent of their dominance in the artificial intelligence sector.

In its latest results, Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue of $26 billion — up 18% from the previous quarter and up 262% from the same period last year. Net income also rose sharply, from $2 billion a year ago to nearly $15 billion last month.

CEO and founder Jensen Huang said at the time that “the next industrial revolution has begun.”

“Companies and countries are working with Nvidia to transform trillion-dollar traditional data centers into accelerated data centers and build a new type of data center – AI factories – to produce a new commodity: artificial intelligence,” Huang said.

“Artificial intelligence will bring significant productivity gains to almost every industry and help companies become more cost- and energy-efficient while increasing revenue-generating opportunities.”

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