TECH NEWS – Nvidia’s offices have already been raided by the authorities once, and that scenario could be repeated soon.

It’s the French competition authority, Autorité de la Concurrence (from now on just Autorité), that says Nvidia is taking steps that prevent fair competition, Reuters reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. The details are not yet public, but it is likely that the graphics card maker could be prosecuted for anti-competitive actions. Last September, the Autorité raided the company’s offices, and the agency’s press release, while not naming Nvidia, “circumscribes” the company by defining it, without naming it, as “a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics card sector…”.

The Autorité wrote on Friday that concerns had also been raised in another sector. It is the generative artificial intelligence. Here, Nvidia is mentioned several times by the authority because it is one of the big digital companies (the others are Amazon, Apple, Meta; the largest is Microsoft and Google-owned Alphabet) involved in generative AI, but it is the only one that produces computer components. There are several risks in the sector, but Nvidia was cited for only one: “the risk of misuse by chip manufacturers.”

“The Autorité identified a number of potential risks, such as price fixing, production restrictions, unfair contract terms and discriminatory behavior. Concerns were also raised about the industry’s dependence on Nvidia’s CUDA chip programming software (the only software that is 100% compatible with the GPUs that have become essential for accelerated computing). Recent announcements of Nvidia’s investments in AI-focused cloud service providers such as CoreWeave also raise concerns. The graphics card sector, which was the subject of an unannounced inspection in September 2023, is being closely scrutinized by the Autorité’s investigative services,” the Autorité wrote.

Nvidia has a 70-95% share of the AI hardware market and 76% in the Steam Hardware Survey. Intel and AMD can offer alternatives in the consumer segment, and Autorité pointed out that alternatives to CUDA software are starting to emerge (AMD: ROCm, Intel: OneApi) that are more open and therefore may be more sustainable in the long term. Nvidia develops CUDA as closed software.

We’ll see what comes of it.

Source: PCGamer, Reuters, Autorité, CNBC, Steam