Media reports of searches at Nvidia’s French office

French authorities conducted searches at Nvidia’s local office as part of an antitrust investigation into the cloud-computing sector. The Wall Street Journal.

Neither law enforcement nor the chipmaker’s representatives commented on the incident.

The publication reported the raid on September 28. A day earlier, the French antitrust regulator Autorité de la Concurrence issued a press release, according to which investigative services “conducted searches at the premises of the company suspected of anticompetitive practices in the graphics-card sector.”

“Such unexpected raids do not necessarily indicate a violation of the law that could be attributed to the company,” the Autorité de la Concurrence clarified.

They added that they would not comment on the name of the organisation.

Earlier, the regulator published a study of the cloud-computing sector. The document does not mention Nvidia; attention was focused on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

“In 2021, Amazon and Microsoft accounted for 46% and 17% of revenues from IaaS and PaaS services, respectively. Given their financial capabilities and digital ecosystems, these hyperscale companies may impede competition,” the authors of the report noted.

The document notes that the Autorité de la Concurrence has tools to combat unfair competition and abuses of the law.

For the second quarter of the 2024 financial year Nvidia posted a record profit. CEO Jensen Huang attributed the results to a rapid shift toward AI deployment.

The chipmaker’s Q1 2024 financial-year report triggered a rally in AI-related cryptocurrencies.

As reported in September, the issuer of USDT, Tether Limited spent $420 million on purchasing 10,000 Nvidia H100 chips.