The French competition authority has raided the Nvidia France office, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report.
Both outlets published articles noting that the French antitrust enforcers raided the local offices for the GPU maker, citing suspicion that the company was partaking in anti-competitive practices. The raid occurred yesterday morning. While the French competition authority did not disclose exactly which business it raided specifically, sources familiar with the matter told WSJ that Nvidia was the company raided.
"Following authorization from a liberty and custody judge, the investigation services of the Autorité de la concurrence carried out a dawn raid at the premises of a company suspected of having implemented anticompetitive practices in the graphics cards sector," the French competition authority wrote in a press release published today.
Nvidia U.S. declined to comment.
Interestingly, France's competition authority noted that the raid followed a broader inquiry into the cloud-computing sector, published this past June. The French competition authority cited concerns that cloud-computing companies could leverage their computing power in anti-competitive practices.
Dating back to the '90s, Nvidia has been making graphics cards. Over the last several years, the tech giant has become a dominating force in the gaming graphics card market, taking the lead in a GPU war that includes AMD's Radeon RX and the more recent player in the market, Intel and its Arc series.
While GPUs are the thing Nvidia is best known for, the company also makes chips for cloud-computing companies, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google being the heaviest hitters in this particular market. All of these companies operate large data centers, leasing its technologies to other companies and even offering the tech to governments. Aside from making chips for these providers, Nvidia announced earlier this month that it wants to leverage its AI hardware to create another source of revenue, causing some competition.
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
