The French Autorité de la concurrence (Competition Authority) appears likely to soon charge Nvidia with anti-competitive business practices, according to sources obtained by Reuters. The charges would come nine months after the Competition Authority raided Nvidia's French offices, and hinge on Nvidia's complete dominion over the AI compute space.
Nvidia, which recently became the largest company by market cap in the world (currently in 3rd place at the time of writing), has climbed to this great height thanks to the AI boom. Sparked by the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI for consumers and machine learning for enterprise applications, Nvidia has established itself as the only place to buy shovels for the AI gold rush, as its graphics cards are the best solution for high-level AI computing. Billion-dollar orders like Elon Musk's purchase of 100,000 H100 GPUs have become routine headlines for Nvidia.
This monopoly is the source of the French Competition Authority's concern. The regulatory board published a report last Friday surveying the state of the AI market and investigating how much competition and therefore innovation is allowed in its current state. In this report, the Competition Authority expressed concern over the risk of abuse by chip providers. Specifically mentioned was "the sector’s dependence on Nvidia’s CUDA chip programming software (the only one that is 100% compatible with the [Nvidia] GPUs that have become essential for accelerated computing)." A red flag was also raised by Nvidia's investments in AI cloud providers like CoreWeave, investment partnerships that may unduly inflate Nvidia's market performance.
The Authority also outlines potential risks from chip providers, including price fixing, production restrictions, and unfair contract conditions/behaviors. While Nvidia is not expressly accused of these potential offenses, Nvidia is the only chip provider named in the report. The AI market's overwhelming dependency on Nvidia hardware was not a major concern point for the Authority, which seems to have found alternative sources like Google's TPU AI accelerators to be sufficient competition.
Nvidia risks a maximum penalty of 10% of its annual global revenue in fines if found to be breaching French antitrust and anti-competition laws. This assumes that the French government will pursue legislation against Nvidia and that Nvidia would receive the highest punishment, which is an unlikely but dizzying prospect for the tech giant.
The house that Huang built also faces stormy waters back in the United States, where Nvidia seeks to gain an export license to send its products to the heavily sanctioned Middle East. The FTC continues to monitor Nvidia since blocking its attempted $40 billion Arm merger in 2022.
