Serious accusation: Nvidia allegedly violates antitrust law

Anyone who deals with graphics cards cannot avoid Nvidia. The US company has built up great market power in recent years, which is naturally a thorn in the side of the competition. They are now making serious accusations and even classifying the GPU manufacturer as a cartel.

Nvidia celebrates great success

The chip crisis was also a real horror for the graphics card industry. However, Nvidia seems to have emerged from the economic downturn all the stronger. However, this is not due to the fact that buyers are increasingly turning to the manufacturer’s GPUs. Rather, Nvidia has conquered a whole new market – data centers. This is where the US company is selling its H100 accelerator like hot cakes and generating high profits. Experts believe that Nvidia has gained an impressive 80 percent market share in the field of chips for AI calculations. But is the company’s approach legal? The competition publicly doubts this, as can be seen from an article in the Wall Street Journal.

This is surprising insofar as several competition authorities around the world have already looked into whether or not the US company is guilty of infringements. No illegal activities have been found in the EU, France, the UK or China. But how did the allegations come about? According to the Wall Street Journal’s sources, Nvidia relies on its customers to be highly dependent. This means that the sale of the H100 accelerator is linked to a follow-up contract. Only those who commit to continuing to rely on Nvidia in the coming years will receive their chips. This is a perfidious way for Nvidia to slow down the purchase or in-house development of alternative AI chips.

Ex-AMD boss confirms accusations

If a customer does not adhere to Nvidia’s specifications, Nvidia would delay deliveries with flimsy excuses, for example. Among other things, there would then be talk of delivery bottlenecks. Scott Herkelman, who was on the AMD board until the end of 2023, also confirmed the accusations that are now being made about Platform X. The effects of the problem can apparently be seen in the behavior of well-known companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. These companies regularly speak publicly about the fact that they will not be producing chips to compete with the H100.

This is quite surprising, as all three tech companies offer comprehensive AI solutions and the development of their own accelerator is therefore quite obvious. There are really serious allegations here. If they are true, Nvidia would be putting a gun to its customers’ chests. We are curious to see whether others from the industry will come forward or whether competition authorities will take action again. But it could also simply be a case of bad headlines that the competition now wants to spread.