After going after Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google; European Union’s antitrust chief now has warning for America’s biggest chip companies Nvidia and AMD; says: We are looking at …
Nvidia and other US chipmakers may be Europe’s new targets. As the European Union (EU) expands its scrutiny of the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera has warned American chipmakers, saying, “We are looking at the entire AI stack,” referring to the technologies and services that support AI systems, a Bloomberg report claims. The Spanish jurist has revealed that the bloc’s antitrust regulators are now examining the roles of major US chipmakers, including Nvidia and AMD. The warning comes as the EU continues its competition probes involving companies such as Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Google. Recently, FCC chairman Brendan Carr expressed concerns about the EU’s digital taxes. Europe going after major American tech companies has made the Trump administration so angry that America has also threatened to impose retaliatory measures on European companies such as Accenture, Spotify, and Siemens.
What EU said about investigating Nvidia and other chipmakers
Speaking at Berlin’s International Conference on Competition this week, Ribera said regulators are concerned about how large technology companies could shape the AI market structure and “entrench corporate power” across different layers of the industry.She added that regulators are investigating not only the final AI apps but also the “underlying models that power them, the data the models are trained on, and the cloud infrastructure and energy sources at their foundation.”
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Nvidia’s 80% market share may be big concern for EU
EU officials have already been discussing potential bottlenecks, such as Nvidia’s dominance in the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), which has added to scrutiny from the EU’s antitrust regulator, Bloomberg adds. This comes as GPUs have become one of the most scarce resources in the tech world, prompting cloud computing providers to compete for access.Nvidia’s H100 processing units have helped it gain market share above 80%, according to estimates, ahead of rivals Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the report notes. If Europe launches a formal antitrust investigation, companies accused of violations would face demands to change their business practices and hefty fines.Apart from this, the EU’s antitrust watchdogs have been probing Meta’s moves to shut out rival AI chatbots from accessing WhatsApp to provide their services. Earlier this year, Meta received a warning about its conduct, which “risks blocking competitors from entering or expanding in the rapidly growing market for AI assistants.”As per the report, Ribera also noted that a recent proposal from Meta to start charging a fee rather than imposing an outright ban is being carefully assessed by her team, which will soon decide whether it’s necessary to intervene further.
