Why is France raiding a graphics card company?
A raid by French authorities of the offices of a technology firm named as Nvidia in media reports is the latest among a string of such actions by European regulators as they look to check the dominance of Big Tech companies from thwarting competition.
The French competition authority (FCA) said on Wednesday it conducted the dawn raid a day earlier on a company in the "graphics cards sector", it said. French newspaper Challenges and the Wall Street Journal identified the company as Nvidia.
Nvidia and the FCA declined to comment.
Nvidia makes graphics processing units (GPUs), chips that break down a computer task into smaller pieces and processes them together, making it faster than traditional methods.
The GPUs are highly sought by technology companies for their data centres, by video game console makers and even by bitcoin miners to solve the complex math puzzles and earn more cryptocurrencies.
Nvidia has a near-monopoly of the GPU market with 84% market share, leagues ahead of rivals Intel and AMD. With a market valuation of $1 trillion,Nvidia is also becoming crucial to fast-developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Almost all computing systems used to power services like ChatGPT - OpenAI's blockbuster generative AI chatbot - use GPUs from Nvidia.
While GPU prices start from over $1,000, the ones favoured by AI companies can cost well over $10,000. Specialized AI systems from Nvidia such as DGX A100 start at $199,000, or the price of four Tesla Model 3s.
Oracle, for example, said it has been spending billions of dollars on Nvidia chips.
The FCA earlier this year issued a report on the competitive functioning of the cloud computing sector.
It was looking at the market dominance of cloud companies such as Amazon, Google
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