French antitrust authorities raided NVIDIA and its offices in the country last week. According to Challenges, the French newspaper, the raid, which was conducted at dawn, was part of the country’s crackdown on tech companies the European Union (EU) suspects of having “implemented anti-competitive practices in the graphics sector”.
The raid was obviously a surprise to NVIDIA and was reportedly tied to a larger investigation into the health of the cloud computing market. Specifically, the investigation is aimed at determining if the GPU brand was unfairly squeezing out newer companies in the market. A part of the French investigation determined that “The likelihood of a new operator being able to gain market share rapidly appears limited, excluding companies who are already powerful in other digital markets.”
At the time of this publication, neither NVIDIA nor the French antitrust authorities have commented on the raid, with the former outrightly declining to comment. As to why NVIDIA was a prime target for the French government, Reuters pretty much explained it well: the GPU brand currently has a near market monopoly of 84% market share, well ahead of its red rival AMD and Intel, the latter being a more recent arrival with its ARC GPU series.
It’s not just the consumer side in which NVIDIA holds a firm dominance – over in the AI market sector, the brand’s HPC systems and datacentre GPUs are the engine that drives the services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPU, as one primary example.
