What you need to know
- The French competition authority raided NVIDIA offices on Wednesday, September 27.
- The authority has increased its scrutiny on the chip manufacturer for anti-competitive practices regarding the cloud computing and AI chip markets.
NVIDIA's local offices in France were hit by a dawn raid from the country's competition authority early on Wednesday, September 27. French regulators initially refused to confirm the intended target of the raid, choosing instead to refer only to "anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector."
In a statement from the French Competition Authority website, the regulators acknowledged that the raid was done with the authorization of a judge, but that the raid did not pre-suppose that the unnamed company in question had breached the law.
The Wall Street Journal confirmed NVIDIA as the target of the raid.
Such dawn raids do not pre-suppose the existence of a breach of the law which could be imputed to the company involved in the alleged practices, which only a full investigation into the merits of the case could establish, if appropriate.
Autorité de la concurrence
NVIDIA is one of the leading chip manufacturers in the world, and the company has benefited exponentially from increased interest in AI technology and cloud computing. Valued at more than $1 trillion, NVIDIA holds 84% of GPU market share. The company reported an astounding $13.5 billion in revenue earlier this year.
The growing cloud and AI markets have garnered more interest from antitrust regulators as of late. The raid on NVIDIA's offices were part of a more broad investigation into the two markets, as investigators look into whether the larger players in the tech sector were actively working together to garner an unfair advantage against potential new competitors.
This concern was echoed in the UK when the Competition and Markets Authority there rejected Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. The CMA argued that Microsoft, who signed a 10-year deal with NVIDIA to add ABK's catalog to its GeForce Now cloud streaming platform, was picking and choosing their future competition.
Microsoft, along with Google and Amazon, have been primary targets in the FCA's investigation regarding market dominance and anticompetitive practices.
