What simply occurred? Nvidia’s places of work in France have been raided by the nation’s antitrust enforcers over suspicions of anticompetitive practices. While the likes of Google and Apple have lengthy fought anticompetitive fees from regulators, this could be the primary time Team Green, which has seen its inventory skyrocket for the reason that AI growth started, has been accused of such issues.
The Wall Street Journal writes that the French competitors authority didn’t identify the placement that had been focused within the daybreak raid this week. However, the company stated in a press launch that it was “an organization suspected of getting carried out anticompetitive practices within the graphics playing cards sector.” People acquainted with the matter stated Nvidia was the topic of the raid.
The WSJ writes that some of these raids happen very first thing within the morning and often contain authorities seizing an organization’s premises and bodily and digital supplies, in addition to interviewing staff who arrive for work.
Few corporations have benefited from the surge in demand for generative AI as a lot as Nvidia. The firm’s income for Q2 FY2024 got here in at a large $13.5 billion, marking a 101% enhance in comparison with the identical interval one 12 months earlier. Most of that quantity ($10.32 billion) got here from its information center-class GPUs utilized in AI programs – one other report and greater than double what the identical class earned within the earlier quarter.
Thanks to the excessive margins it makes on information middle playing cards – Nvidia generates as much as 1,000% revenue on each H100 GPU offered – the corporate made $6.1 billion in revenue throughout the quarter, up 843% YoY and greater than triple what it made throughout the earlier quarter. The outcomes imply Nvidia has now moved previous Qualcomm to develop into the world’s highest-earning fabless chip designer.
The French authority stated it performed the raid following an investigation into the cloud-computing sector, which examined issues that smaller corporations had been being unfairly pushed out by bigger companies with entry to extra computing energy. The outcomes of that inquiry, printed in June, targeted on the three “hyperscalers” dominating the trade: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Nvidia is just not talked about within the investigation.
The French company emphasizes that daybreak raids “don’t pre-suppose the existence of a breach of the legislation,” including that “solely a full investigation” might decide if any crimes have been dedicated.
