US progressives push for Nvidia antitrust investigation
reuters.com
reuters.com
The letter linked in the article does vaguely allude to possible product bundling and exclusivity contracts but, while certain such arrangements might potentially be illegal in some specific scenarios, many times such deals are perfectly legal. Of course, it's entirely possible NVidia has secretly done illegal things which aren't apparent on the surface but there's no evidence of that presented here and the politicians seem to basically be asserting NVidia is guilty just because they've been overwhelmingly successful, have no serious competition in high-end GPUs and can command exorbitant prices. But none of those things are illegal.
I do agree that NVidia competes aggressively in the market by, for example, rushing new variations of their consumer GPUs to market to minimize any price/performance advantage new AMD GPUs might present - but that's just competing - and generally positive for consumers. The reason I find the spin on this odd is that it's all so vague. Being hugely profitable and strategically crucial isn't illegal, so why are politicians highlighting that like it is? Especially when there are several other tech giants who I think it's clear have engaged in illegally anti-competitive behavior - and, to me, the evidence with those companies is pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. Whereas in NVidia's case, as much as I personally dislike their current ability to sustain very high margins, it's entirely possible they're dominant simply because they've made better products and been lucky (or smart) enough to be in exactly the right market at the right time - at least three times over the past 20 years (3D gaming, crypto-mining, AI).
Jensen pretty painstakingly built the modern landscape of accelerated (scientific) compute from nothing over three decades. Nvidia aren't barring anyone from entry, and I think we've all benefited from the lack of strict product segmentation and feature-gating since they merged the Quadro line into RTX (there's an incredible variety of tech packed into each card). Prices are a little high if you want density, but at least you're not missing out anymore by going with PCIe.
I look forward to understanding the context for the investigation. I can't envision that the Progressive interest is to ensure a healthy competitive corporate climate because Intel have put themselves in a dire situation, but I'm afraid that's how it'll be co-opted over "the nation would benefit from greater resiliency and support for non-big tech".
The real question is whether someone sent donations in a certain direction and cheesed off the so-called Progressives.