According to The Wall Street Journal, this week the competition authority of France conducted a raid on NVIDIA’s offices in the country. Although NVIDIA is not explicitly mentioned by the French agency, it is confirmed that the raid was prompted by concerns regarding anti-competitive practices in the graphics cards industry, more than likely spiraling further from the immerging AI market.
NVIDIA naturally have decided to remain silent on the matter, mostly because any word of mouth about the ordeal isn’t likely to go over well with shareholders and the intense swarm of online loyalists of their hardware.
Maybe the whole ordeal has something in connection with NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang selling $42 Million dollars worth of $NVDA shares just a few weeks ago?
The whole raid regarding anti consumer practices regarding cloud-computing amuses me, especially considering how NVIDIA holds a dominant lead in terms of hardware adoption in this particular field, with the company making bank from increased demand for a variety of Tesla / Quadro and H100 hardware units which are sold for thousands of dollars to over ten thousand dollars USD per unit. All for the sake of this new lucrative AI market bubble.
Two French companies, Iliad Group, a telecommunications operator disclosed its installation of H100 GPUs in a data center located in the Paris area and OVHcloud, a cloud services company also announced their plans on increasing their AI / Cloud-computing ability through acquiring NVIDIA’s H100 graphics cards to be made available to their customers for AI applications.
According to the French authority, raids like this usually involve officials arriving early in the morning to search a company’s premises, seize physical and digital materials, and interview employees who show up for work.
According to a machine-translated version of the French agency’s press release, dawn raids are not indicative of a legal violation and only a thorough investigation can determine if any breaches have occurred.
Additionally, the press release states that competition regulators have a responsibility to prevent established players from impeding the progress of smaller or new players in the realm of cloud-computing technologies.
However, I like to believe that the order may have been issued by president Macron himself upon discovering the exorbitant price of €910 EUR for the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, or even possibly the fact that NVIDIA are literally bending over the entire DIY PC market with the RTX 4060 Ti which comes in at over €500 EUR for the 16GB variant.
At least for the time being we have no solid information about the direct reasoning behind the raid or even the aftermath, it’s never a good thing for corporate offices to be investigated in such a manner, especially from such large tech giants as NVIDIA.
