China opens an antitrust investigation into Nvidia

China is investigating Nvidia over antitrust violations, reportedly over claims the chipmaker failed to follow conditions set during China’s approval for its $6.9 billion acquisition of Israeli network hardware company Mellanox in 2020.

While announcing the DGX A100 GPU after acquiring Mellanox, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this while explaining its importance to his company:

“If you take a look at the way modern data centers are architected, the workloads they have to do are more diverse than ever,” explains Huang. “Our approach going forward is not to just focus on the server itself but to think about the entire data center as a computing unit. Going forward I believe the world is going to think about data centers as a computing unit and we’re going to be thinking about data center-scale computing. No longer just personal computers or servers, but we’re going to be operating on the data center scale.”

Since then, the boom in demand for AI chips and servers has driven Nvidia’s value from under $200 billion to over $3 trillion in 2024, surpassing Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

According to Bloomberg, Chinese regulators say Nvidia failed to follow agreements to provide new Mellanox product information within 90 days to other chipmaking firms in the country to avoid a monopoly. At the same time, the US Justice Department is also investigating the company for monopolistic behavior.

The Biden administration also placed new sanctions on China last week to make it more difficult to produce advanced AI chips there, as it also restricts the capabilities of exports by companies like Nvidia. China retaliated with new limitations on key mineral exports to the US.