EU Antitrust Regulators Decline to Launch Formal Probe Into Nvidia AI Chips
EU competition authorities have not opened a formal investigation into chips used for artificial intelligence, the European Commission said on Monday, days after the French competition authority raided Nvidia for alleged anti-competitive practices.
“The Commission has not conducted a formal investigation into the matter you mentioned,” a representative of the EU executive said in an email to Reuters when asked about the matter.
Nvidia declined to comment after the French attack.
Bloomberg News reported last week that the EU’s antitrust watchdog is informally gathering insights into possible abuses in the graphics processing unit market.
Nvidia makes graphics processing units (GPUs), chips that break a computing task into smaller pieces and process them together, making it faster than traditional methods.
Tech companies, video game console manufacturers, and even bitcoin miners are highly seeking GPUs for their data centers to solve complex mathematical puzzles and earn more cryptocurrency.
Nvidia has a near-monopoly in the GPU market with 84 percent market share, leagues ahead of rivals Intel ( INTC.O ) and AMD ( AMD.O ). Nvidia, with a market capitalization of $1 trillion, is also becoming crucial to the rapidly developing artificial intelligence technology.
