Nvidia, one of many international leaders in synthetic intelligence (AI) chip manufacturing with headquarters in California, reportedly confronted a police raid in its French workplaces this week. The motion got here as part of a normal inquiry of French antitrust authorities into the cloud computing sector.
The Wall Avenue Journal reported the raid on Sept. 28, though neither Nvidia nor the French enforcement companies have formally commented on what occurred.
A press launch on the webpage of the French antitrust company, Autorité de la Concurrence, refers to an unannounced inspection within the graphics playing cards sector. In accordance to the discharge, a decide licensed the raid on the premise of the corporate “having carried out anticompetitive practices within the graphics playing cards sector.”
Nevertheless, the raid itself doesn’t “pre-suppose the existence of a breach of the regulation, which could possibly be imputed to the corporate,” because the message from the company specifies.
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Autorité de la Concurrence refers to its personal opinion, issued in conclusion to a year-long examine of the cloud computing sector. Printed in June 2023, this doc doesn’t point out Nvidia. As a substitute it focuses on different tech corporations, specifically the three hyper scalers” — Amazon Net Providers (AWS), Google Clou,d and Microsoft Azure. In response to the company’s information, they signify 80% of the spending development in public cloud infrastructures and purposes in France in 2021:
“Amazon and Microsoft have captured 46% and 17% respectively of revenues from IaaS and PaaS companies in 2021. Given their monetary capacities and their digital ecosystems, these hyperscalers are able to hinder competitors improvement.”
The company is contemplating numerous choices offered by the nationwide competitors legal guidelines and the European Information Act to fight this tendency.
Nvidia inevitably comes below the regulators’ consideration because of its distinctive place because the {hardware} producer for essentially the most modern sectors of the digital trade. The corporate’s current quarterly report revealed that the USA regulators requested it to curb exports of AI chips to “some Center East international locations.” A day later, the USA Division of Commerce denied this data.
