The European Union's antitrust regulators are investigating Nvidia (NVDA, Financial) probes into possible unfair sales practices, including determining whether the company is engaging in bundling. It was further reported that this probe could likely transform into an official investigation. As the sole provider of all generative AI and accelerated computing, Nvidia controls 84% of AI chips. As such, it is receiving increased attention from regulators across the EU, US, UK, China, and South Korea.
The European Commission explicitly targets the sales conditions throughout the EU of Nvidia graphics processing units (DPUs) and whether they bundle their GPU products with networking equipment commercially or technically. This issue is separate from an ongoing investigation into Nvidia's planned acquisition of the AI startup Run: ai. This investigation also investigates whether Nvidia's contracts deny customers choice by requiring them to buy only extra parallel processors alongside GPUs.
Nvidia has done this by stating that it supports competition by offering products that conform to open industry standards. The company insists that each product can stand independently and integrate well into different system configurations.
Still, at this stage, the probe may result in many penalties in case of breach of antitrust legislation, ranging from one to 10% of the company's sales for the entire year when calculating revenue worldwide. Further, even the French antitrust authority is said to be planning to sue the company for the same reasons soon.
