French Antitrust Regulators Preparing Nvidia Charges (reuters.com) 28
French antitrust regulators are preparing to charge Nvidia for allegedly anti-competitive practices, Reuters reported Monday, citing sources. From the report: The French so-called statement of objections or charge sheet would follow dawn raids in the graphics cards sector in September last year which sources said targeted Nvidia. The world's largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics has seen demand for its chips jump following the release of the generative AI application ChatGPT, triggering regulatory scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic.
Anticompetive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anticompetitive with who? I know AMD and some others have fledgling products just coming on to the market, but otherwise, who is even a player in that market?
Is this not like going after Ford for not letting people buy F-150's from other car makers?
Re:Anticompetive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, same. Like, anyone is free to reimplement the whole CUDA stack on their own.
I mean, good luck. But the difficulty is not NVIDIA's fault. *They* put in the work over the years. Others were free to have done so as well, didn't, and now struggle to try to find relevance in a highly profitable market.
I don't think NVidia is going to be on top forever. Newer models are calling for radically different compute architectures, and eventually it's surely going to be on ASICs regardless of what architecture dominates. But for now, they're dominant, and that dominance was earned, not based on some sort of collusion or suppression.
Re: Anticompetive? (Score:3)
I do not think this is factually true.
Didnt nvidia sue for infrigement the translation layers to oneAPI and rocm?
Re: (Score:3)
As far as I'm aware, all they did was say in their license agreement that
"You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the output generated using Software elements for the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target a non-NVIDIA platform,"
Which is dumb because even the DMCA gives an exception to this, and even explicitly protects reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
"The Section 103(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. Â 1201 (f))
Re: (Score:2)
"Anticompetitive" under EU law means giving the government a cut of their profits.
The other players are each EU member country that wants a cut of that.
It doesn't really make any sense to discuss who makes products or not, those details aren't in scope here.
Ahh yes this is 100% EU, it's not like the DoJ is investigating NVIDIA or anything. /s https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
Re: (Score:2)
That is exactly what it is. It means "being very successful".
Re: Anticompetive? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
To answer your question, here is a list [cnbc.com] of other companies competing against Nvidia. These are well established, name brand companies you recognize. They easily have the capacity to compete against Nvidia. They simply came lat
Pedantry (Score:3)
I'll be a bit pedantic here and say nVidia does have a natural monopoly on their graphics chips that run CUDA, which is, by far, the most widespread architecture used for compute and AI. By natural monopoly I mean nVidia got to this position by dumping huge sums of capital into developing their chipset and interface, and working with developers to make sure CUDA is well supported.
They never prevented anyone else from doing the same thing. They never forced anyone else out of the market. They never told PyTo
Re: Pedantry (Score:2)
Yeah its not Nvidias fault some jackass make a copy of CUDA and Open Source it so they must change the EULA essentially banning such clean room implementations.
Re: (Score:3)
Anticompetitive with who?
You don't need someone to be anticompetitive with. That is sort of how antitrust laws work. The absence of competition (i.e. market power) determines some actions a company may or may not take.
But you're asking your answer too quickly (or rather Reuters are posting their news too early) the charge sheet hasn't been publicised yet so the specific complaint is as yet unknown. But suffice to say you don't actually need a specific competitor to fall afoul of antitrust laws.
Re: Anticompetive? (Score:2)
It's kind of pointless to explain antitrust to slashdot, nobody here ever gets it. Especially appletologists.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Fledgling, like a fledgling weigh got chucked out of its nest and abandoned.
Fucks sake AMD, NVidia's policy of supporting ALL their cards and without fuckery isn't a secret sauce. It's right there in pubic for everyone to see and that's why we buy nVidia.
I don't give a crap about CUDA or ROCm. I want pytorch to just work like it does on your main competitor.
Re: Anticompetive? (Score:2)
This is not possible at the moment.
Even if AMD were to release a 100% feature complete competing solution tomorrow and PyTorch were to support it on day 1, most plugins and libraries based on PyTorch are optimized for Nvidia. So it will not ever work the same.
Re: (Score:2)
I do a fair amount of pytorch day to day, I don't use a lot by the way of plugins other than of course CNNs which are NVidia optimized. Especially now torch.compile() works, suddenly stuff that was horrible before and could really benefit from custom kernels works fast.
Even with that, AMD is a PITA. With nvidia, you get literally any card, any card at all, pip install pytorch and it works. At the moment I'm data processing and prototyping on my laptop, with an nvidia card. I don't even know which one, I don
Re: (Score:2)
When when the Frenc and the rest of the EU finally get it?
Yes those damn French and EU working in the United States Department of Justice https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]. Hint: When multiple countries are looking at anti-trust issues, complaining about one of them makes you look like a bit of a tool.
Re: (Score:2)
And shit economies.
Are you talking about the USA: https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com] ???
I Wonder... (Score:2)
Did Ngreedia fail to pay it's monthly EU socialist tax (bribe)? Or do the EU legislators & regulators want a bigger kickback?
INVESTIGATE BRUSSELS and the EU CARTEL
Is it USA? (Score:2)
Is it USA based? Oh, then sue them.
Re: (Score:3)
Is it USA based? Oh, then sue them.
What if the USA is also investigating them? https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com] Would that make you actually engage your brain and attempt to understand the issue?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Never brought a suit in the 3.5 years she has been there.
Anti-trust is a complex issue even when it looks obvious. The entire world over this shit takes longer than 3.5 years. When something is complex you need to put serious effort in up front to make sure it works.
Look at NVIDIA. There were most certainly years before a dawn raid was conducted, and it's been almost another year since the dawn raid and now, and all we have at this point is information that a case is intended to be brought.
Shit takes time.
The EU on the other hand sues anyone based in the US that is successful.
No it doesn't. It sues anyone who breaks EU anti-trust law
Shakedown? (Score:2)
The article is pretty short on details, but these lawsuits sounds like the kind of government shakedown of wealthy corporations you would see perpetrated outside of the G20. First rule of litigation is you never sue/fine poor people. They have no money to give you.