DoJ reportedly advances Nvidia antitrust probe

Uncle Sam apparently worried GPU giant may be punishing customers who shop around

Updated The US Department of Justice on Tuesday is said to have stepped up its antitrust investigation into Nvidia, issuing subpoenas seeking evidence for its case against the AI chip giant.

Citing unnamed persons familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported the legal order comes amid growing concern among watchdogs that Nvidia is engaging in monopolist behavior by making it harder to adopt rivals' products – and punishing customers that attempt to do so.

Nvidia has dismissed the claims, arguing that superior products are the reason for its success. "Nvidia wins on merit, as reflected in our benchmark results and value to customers, who can choose whatever solution is best for them," the GPU giant told Bloomberg.

Nv has previously admitted to prioritizing customers who possess the necessary datacenter capacity to quickly put its hardware to work. The Register has also chatted with Nvidia reps who said they try to prioritize accelerator shipments to operators of prominent AI services.

Nvidia’s accelerator and networking businesses have grown at astounding pace as orgs seek to deploy generative AI services. Training top-end neural networks can require as many as tens of thousands of GPUs, which can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000 apiece. Running inferencing workloads to put models to work also needs accelerators. The amount of hardware you need varies by the size and user demand of the neural nets.

It's estimated that the flurry of investment in GPUs for model training and deployment has helped Nvidia secure more than 80 percent of the AI infrastructure market, despite ongoing efforts by Intel and AMD, at least, to compete with products such as Gaudi3 and MI300X, respectively.

The widespread adoption of these kinds of accelerators – Meta alone is said to be deploying more than 600,000 of the chips – has been reflected in Nvidia's market capitalization, which crested $3 trillion in July. Since then it's slid backwards, resting at a mere $2.65 trillion at the time of writing.

Tuesday's word of these subpoenas came on a day when Nvidia scrip was already slipping further. Shares ended down 9.53 percent at market close. In fact, the market as a whole was hurting on Tuesday for various reasons.

It's not just US authorities that are worried by Nvidia. French regulators are also investigating the Jensen Huang-run mega-corp as part of a broader investigation into the cloud computing sector. The European Union is also said to be digging into the GPU vendor's business practices to determine whether corrective measures are warranted. ®

Updated to add on September 4

In a statement today, Nvidia says that while it has made contact with the US government, it has not been subpoenaed, contrary to what Bloomberg reported.

"We have inquired with the US Department of Justice and have not been subpoenaed," the GPU giant told El Reg. "Nonetheless, we are happy to answer any questions regulators may have about our business."