Chinese regulators are investigating NVIDIA for potential antitrust violations

NVIDIA, graphics chip maker and recent backbone of the AI industry, is under investigation by Chinese regulators over potential antitrust violations, The New York Times reports. The concerns center on the acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, a computer networking company NVIDIA bought in 2020.

As part of the conditions of that acquisition, Chinese regulators required NVIDIA to “provide information about new [Mellanox] products to rivals within 90 days of making them available to NVIDIA,” Bloomberg writes. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation is kicking off its investigation because it believes that those terms were violated. This wouldn’t be the first time NVIDIA has been investigated for monopolistic behavior – The US Department of Justice reportedly launched its own antitrust investigation into NVIDIA in September 2024 – but it has a different flavor in the context of the escalating trade war between the US and China.

On December 1, the US Department of Commerce announced export restrictions and sanctions on 140 Chinese companies producing chipmaking tools, and on “China-bound shipments of high bandwidth memory chips,” Reuters writes. The goal was fairly clear: the US wanted to limit China’s ability to develop advanced AI by preventing it from creating the kind of chips used to train and run it. This fight goes both ways, of course. It seems safe to say that the Chinese ban on all shipments of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the US was a response.

Threatening NVIDIA makes sense on a few fronts. The company’s H100 GPUs were used to train the vast majority of generative AI models used today, something that doesn’t seem likely to change with the Blackwell chips Nvidia announced earlier this year. That’s made it one of the most valuable companies in the world as AI speculation has run rampant, and a big target for governmental oversight. Plus, Bloomberg writes that NVIDIA gets some 15 percent of its revenue from China. However the investigation resolves, NVIDIA feels like a logical next step to escalate the US and China’s conflict even further.

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