The U.S. Department of Justice has reportedly sent a subpoena to Nvidia, a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor industry, for an antitrust investigation.
According to Business Insider and Bloomberg News on the 4th (local time), the U.S. Department of Justice has taken such action and is investigating whether Nvidia’s dominance has adversely affected the market.
The U.S. Department of Justice previously sent related questionnaires to several companies, and now Nvidia’s subpoena means it is potentially one step closer to litigation, foreign media reported.
The U.S. Department of Justice is known to be investigating anti-trust issues with Nvidia in many ways.
Earlier last month, U.S. media Deformation reported that the Justice Department was looking into whether Nvidia pressured its products to purchase AI chips due to reports from competitors such as AMD.
Politico also reported that the Ministry of Justice is investigating Nvidia’s acquisition of software startup Run:ai in April.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also investigating whether Microsoft and OpenAI violated antitrust laws through partnerships. OpenAI uses Nvidia’s chips to train the giant language models that form the backbone of its products, including ChatGPT.
Coincidentally, Nvidia’s stock price plunged more than 10 percent on the day. U.S. manufacturing indicators for August, which were released on the same day, were affected by concerns over a recession.
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
