France wants to take action against Nvidia's AI dominance
Nvidia comes off badly in a report by the French antitrust authority. Measures are reportedly already being prepared.
Nvidia's boss Jensen Huang with the next-gen hardware codenamed Blackwell.
(Image: Nvidia)
The French Autorité de la Concurrence could topple the first domino against Nvidia's market dominance in AI accelerators. In an initial report, the antitrust authority has summarized the market situation and has already investigated suspected infringements. Among others, Nvidia is mentioned by name in the report.
The first point under the competition risks is "The risk of abuse by chip suppliers". In it, the authority refers to Nvidia's CUDA platform. This stands for "Compute Unified Device Architecture" and describes Nvidia's interaction of hardware and software for programming applications.
"Concerns have also been raised about the sector's reliance on Nvidia's CUDA chip programming software (the only one that is 100% compatible with the GPUs essential for accelerated computing). Recent announcements of Nvidia's investments in AI-focused cloud service providers such as CoreWeave are also a cause for concern."
Nvidia invests in its software ecosystem like no other hardware manufacturer. The company employs around 30,000 people – more than half are said to develop software.
Nvidia was an early mover in artificial intelligence and has developed comprehensive frameworks that make it easy to start programming. However, hyperscalers in particular are locked into Nvidia's ecosystem in the long term because they cannot run on chips from other companies. Nvidia is currently trying to make its own products more and more all-encompassing – to the complete supercomputer from its hand.
Illegal price fixing
The French antitrust authority has also found evidence of illegal activities, but has not explicitly named any company in this context:
"The Autorité has identified several potential risks, such as price fixing, production restrictions, unfair contract terms and discriminatory behavior."
As a first step, the authority is proposing some measures. First, the EU could regulate companies like Nvidia with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This could force Nvidia to open up its CUDA platform to competitors such as AMD and Intel. The Autorité recommends exhausting all possibilities offered by antitrust laws.
Based on internal sources, the news agency Reuters reports that France is already preparing concrete measures against Nvidia's AI dominance. Based on France's findings, the European Commission could apply measures across the EU.
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