Recently, there is news thatUSAMinistry of JusticeAcquisition of NvidiaIsraelAIStartups The news that the company launched an investigation into Run:ai on suspicion of possible antitrust violations has attracted widespread attention.
Nvidia announced the acquisition in April this year, but the price was not disclosed. According to TechCrunch, the acquisition price was estimated to be about $700 million. The US Department of Justice has asked market participants about the competitive impact of the transaction.
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The scope of the investigation is unclear, but the Justice Department has asked questions such as whether the deal would suppress emerging competition and entrench Nvidia's dominant market position in the field.
On Thursday, Nvidia said the company "wins by strength" and "strictly complies with all laws." It also said it will continue to support aspiring innovators in various industries and markets and is willing to provide regulators with any information they need. Run:ai did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the Department of Justice declined to comment.
Currently, US regulators and law enforcement agencies have stepped up their scrutiny of anti-competitive behavior in the field of artificial intelligence, especially those related to large technology giants such as Nvidia. In June this year, Jonathan Kanter, head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, told the Financial Times that he was reviewing "monopoly bottlenecks" including data used to train large language models and access to key hardware such as graphics processing unit chips, and pointed out that GPUs used to train large language models have become "scarce resources."
Nvidia dominates sales of the most advanced GPUs. Run:ai previously partnered with the tech giant to develop a platform that optimizes the use of GPUs.
As part of the investigation, the Justice Department is seeking information about how Nvidia decides its chip allocations, Politico first reported. Government lawyers are also asking about Nvidia's software platform Cuda, which enables chips originally used for graphics processing to accelerate artificial intelligence applications and is considered one of Nvidia's most critical tools by industry insiders.
In June, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (the competition regulator) reached an agreement to divide antitrust oversight of key AI players. The Justice Department will lead the investigation of Nvidia, while the FTC will oversee the assessment of Microsoft and OpenAI (the startup behind ChatGPT).