French authorities reportedly went all Task Force 141 on Nvidia’s local offices last week as part of its ongoing probe into the company’s alleged anti-competitive practices. The raid was conducted on the basis of Autorité de la concurrence’s final opinion report that published a market study in June regarding cloud sector competition, or rather, the relative lack thereof.
The Autorité de la concurrence released a press release on September 27 but it didn’t name Nvidia. Instead, it stated it conducted the raid on a company “suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector.”
Nvidia is enjoying a major financial boon following the mainstream adoption of AI technology. This August, it doubled its revenue (a new record) from the same time last year, with its second quarter revenue increasing by 88% from the first quarter. The prevalent use of generative AI language models is largely attributed to Nvidia’s revenue skyrocketing to more than a trillion in June, where it remains today.
French authorities appear to have it out for big tech companies lately. Last month, the country suspended the sales of the iPhone 12, which Apple released in 2020, due to high radition levels, which forced Apple to release a software update exclusive to the French market to fix the issue.
But, it’s not just the French that are paying a keen interest to Nvidia. The European Commission has also started looking into the possibility of Nvidia resorting to the use of unfair practices as it secures the majority market share of the graphics cards for artificial intelligence applications.
In a report by Bloomberg, investigators are currently deliberating if a formal investigation is necessary.
One of the largest suppliers of graphics cards in the world for decades, Nvidia’s explosive growth in recent years is due to how indispensable its products have become for large-scale AI operations. It holds a sizable lead over its competitors like AMD and Intel in this arena. If found guilty for antitrust practices, Nvidia is facing penalties potentially worth billions of dollars.
However, Nvidia’s rise in the AI chip industry isn’t due to some overnight success. The company was the first to invest a significant amount of time and money in optimizing its CUDA software framework specifically for AI applications, years before it became mainstream. By adopting this technology ahead of its competition, Nvidia positioned itself as the market leader in training sophistical large scale language models as Intel and AMD try to catch up.
The added scrutiny following Nvidia’s recent market dominance is reminiscent of how athletes often get tested for use of steroids after putting on an excellent performance.
It’s unclear what will come off the potential investigation into Nvidia’s bet on the right technologies paying off, but it’s best to assume that we’ll be right on top of it.
Speaking of AI, Meta recently introduced its plans to roll out 28 new AI chatbots with likenesses based off of popular mainstream figures.
