The French competition authority has conducted a raid at the Nvidia France office, as reported by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Both news outlets have published articles highlighting the suspicions of French antitrust enforcers regarding Nvidia's involvement in anti-competitive activities. This raid took place yesterday morning, and although the French competition authority did not officially disclose the targeted business, sources with knowledge of the situation informed WSJ that Nvidia was indeed the company subject to the raid.
In a press release issued today, the French competition authority stated, "Following authorization from a liberty and custody judge, the investigation services of the Autorité de la concurrence carried out a dawn raid at the premises of a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector."
Nvidia U.S. has refrained from making any comments on the matter.
[Note: The reference to "Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition – Photos" seems unrelated to the news article provided, so I have excluded it from the retyped content.]
Interestingly, France's competition authority indicated that the recent raid was part of a broader investigation into the cloud-computing sector, which was publicly disclosed back in June. The French competition authority expressed concerns about the potential for cloud-computing companies to misuse their computing capabilities in ways that could harm competition.
Nvidia has a long history dating back to the 1990s as a manufacturer of graphics cards. In recent years, the company has emerged as a dominant player in the gaming graphics card market, leading the charge in a competitive GPU arena that includes rivals like AMD's Radeon RX and the newcomer, Intel, with its Arc series.
While Nvidia is most renowned for its GPUs, it also produces chips tailored for cloud-computing companies. Major players in this realm include Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, all of which operate substantial data centers. These companies not only utilize Nvidia's technology but also offer it to other businesses and even governmental entities. Additionally, Nvidia recently announced plans to utilize its AI hardware to generate additional revenue, intensifying competition in this sector.