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Comment by aorth | Hacker News Reader

Original source, as cited in the article:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-offices-france-raided-...

TL;DR:

French antitrust enforcers raided the offices of a business suspected of engaging in “anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector,” targeting a company that the Wall Street Journal identified as Nvidia Corp

The move suggests Nvidia’s dominant role in supplying chips for artificial intelligence tasks is coming under closer scrutiny.

Eh, this is more a case of the competitors failing than nVidia abusing their market position. Maybe if AMD and Intel put more effort into making their drivers not suck for AI they could sell millions of cards too.

nVidia is playing favorites in allocating its GPUs. It goes beyond the graphics card market, they are trying to corner the market for Cloud AI:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-muscles-into-...

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/in-an-unusual-move-n...

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/why-nvidia-aids-clou...

I realize it's hard to sympathize with AWS as a victim, but any monopolist like nVidia leveraging its monopoly in one sector (AI chips) to gain a monopoly in another is the kind of antitrust violation that is precisely what competition authorities are made to investigate.

There are queues for H100 and everybody wants to buy them. How should they solve the allocation problem? They can also pull out of the market and sell elsewhere comfortably without any crazy bureaucrats harassing them because some French company/branch lost a bid and overestimated its importance to nVidia.

Those monopolist allocation issues usually involve legal cpunsle, cannot be based on sales price or competition, cannot be used to corner markets and so on. In the end, everyone should get an equal haircut, and nobody shoupd be able to jump the line. Classic issue in anti-trust.

Source: Had some intense months discussing exactly such kind of situation. Hence I know it is absolutely solveable, but there are always people who just cannot accept to follow rules and accept constraints, which usually leads to some penalties down the line.

We’ll see about that I guess

> Eh, this is more a case of the competitors failing than nVidia abusing their market position.

Supposedly, but usually stable governments don't do raid on publicly traded companies on a whim, so maybe there is more to the story we don't know about yet?

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