According to Cointelegraph, Nvidia, a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) chip production, reportedly faced a police raid at its French offices this week. The raid was part of a general inquiry by French antitrust authorities into the cloud computing sector. The Wall Street Journal reported the raid, but neither Nvidia nor the French enforcement agencies have officially commented on the incident.
A press release on the French antitrust agency, the Autorité de la Concurrence's webpage, refers to an unannounced inspection in the graphics cards sector. According to the release, a judge authorized the raid at the company's premises for allegedly implementing anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector. However, the agency clarified that the raid does not presuppose the existence of a breach of the law that could be imputed to the company.
The Autorité de la Concurrence's opinion is based on a year-long study of the cloud computing sector, published in June 2023. The document does not mention Nvidia but focuses on other tech companies, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, which represent 80% of the spending growth in public cloud infrastructures and applications in France in 2021. The agency is considering various options provided by national competition laws and the European Data Act to combat this tendency. Nvidia's unique position as a hardware producer for the most innovative sectors of the digital industry has inevitably drawn the attention of regulators. The company's recent quarterly report revealed that US regulators asked it to curb exports of AI chips to some Middle East countries, but the US Department of Commerce denied this information a day later.
