China is investigating Nvidia for violating antitrust laws, reportedly because the chipmaker failed to meet the conditions set during China’s approval of the acquisition of Israeli networking equipment company Mellanox for USD 6.9 billion in 2020.
Announcing the DGX A100 GPU after the Mellanox acquisition, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this, explaining its importance to his company:
“If you look at the architecture of today’s data centers, you’ll see that the workloads they have to run are more diverse than ever,” Huang explains. “Our approach going forward is to not just focus on the server itself, but to think of the entire data center as a computing unit. I believe that in the future, the world will think of data centers as a computing unit, and we will think of computing at the scale of data centers. It won’t be just personal computers or servers anymore, we’ll be working at the scale of data centers.”
Since then, the boom in demand for artificial intelligence chips and servers has boosted Nvidia’s value from less than $200 billion to more than $3 trillion in 2024, outpacing Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
According to Bloomberg, Chinese regulators claim that Nvidia failed to fulfill an agreement to provide information about new Mellanox products within 90 days to other chipmakers in the country to avoid a monopoly. At the same time, the US Department of Justice is also investigating the company for monopolistic behavior.
Last week, the Biden administration also imposed new sanctions on China to make it more difficult to produce advanced artificial intelligence chips there, as it also limits export opportunities for companies like Nvidia. China responded with new restrictions on exports of key minerals to the United States.
