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A Beijing regulator has found Nvidia violated China’s antitrust law, in a preliminary finding against the world’s most valuable chipmaker.
Nvidia had failed to fully comply with provisions outlined when it acquired Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-American supplier of networking products, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said on Monday. Beijing conditionally approved the US chipmaker’s acquisition of Mellanox in 2020.
Monday’s statement came as US and Chinese officials prepared for more talks in Madrid over trade, with a tariff truce between the world’s two largest economies set to expire in November.
SAMR reached its conclusion weeks before today’s announcement, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, adding that the regulator had released the statement now to give China greater leverage in the trade talks.
The regulator started the anti-monopoly investigation in December, a week after Washington unveiled tougher export controls on advanced high-bandwidth memory chips and chipmaking equipment to the country.
SAMR then spent months interviewing relevant parties and gathered legal opinions to build the case, the people said.
Nvidia bought Mellanox for $6.9bn in 2020 and the acquisition helped the chipmaker to step up into the data centre and high-performance computing market where it is now a dominant player.
The US chipmaker is increasingly facing pressure in China, one of its largest and fastest growing overseas markets.
Chinese regulators have been exerting pressure on the country’s tech companies warning them not to buy Nvidia’s H20 chip, a less powerful AI chip tailor-made for China to comply with US export controls.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to request for comment. SAMR did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
