NVIDIA, the graphics chip maker and recent stalwart of the AI industry, is under investigation by Chinese regulators over possible antitrust violations, The New York Times reported. The concerns center on NVIDIA’s acquisition of computer networking company Mellanox Technologies, which it acquired in 2020.
As part of the terms of that acquisition, Chinese regulators required NVIDIA to “provide information about the new (Mellanox) product to competitors within 90 days of NVIDIA making it available,” Bloomberg said. is writing. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation believes these conditions have been violated and has launched an investigation. This is not the first time NVIDIA has been investigated for monopolistic practices – the US Department of Justice reportedly launched its own antitrust investigation into NVIDIA in September 2024 – but the trade war between the US The investigation has taken on a different flavor in the escalating situation and China.
On Dec. 1, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced export restrictions and sanctions on 140 Chinese companies that make chip-making tools and “shipments of high-bandwidth memory chips to China,” Reuters writes. The goal was pretty clear. The United States wanted to limit China’s ability to develop advanced AI by preventing it from creating the types of chips used to train and run advanced AI. Of course, this battle goes both ways. It is safe to say that it was in response to this that China banned all shipments of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States.
Blackmailing NVIDIA makes sense in several ways. The company’s H100 GPUs are used to train the majority of generative AI models in use today, and this doesn’t seem likely to change with the Blackwell chips that Nvidia announced earlier this year. That makes it one of the world’s most valuable companies and the subject of significant government scrutiny amid rampant AI speculation. Additionally, Bloomberg writes that NVIDIA derives about 15% of its revenue from China. No matter how the investigation resolves, NVIDIA feels like a logical next step in further escalating the conflict between the United States and China.
