EU begins questioning Nvidia customers as part of Run.ai scrutiny: report
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Contributor since / Followers
Contributor since / Followers
2 months ago
BING-JHEN HONG
- The European Commission has started to question some of Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) customers if they have received discounts to buy its GPU software products along with its GPUs, Reuters reported.
- Shares of the tech giant were up more than 3.5% in afternoon trading.
- The survey to Nvidia’s customers focused on some business practices that could further add to the Jensen Huang-led company’s market share in GPUs geared towards artificial intelligence, the news outlet added. The inquiry is part of the European Commission’s potential probe into Nvidia’s proposed $700M acquisition of Run:ai.
- “We look forward to welcoming the Run:ai employees to our team,” an Nvidia spokesperson told Seeking Alpha. “Although Run:ai supports only NVIDIA GPUs today, we plan to open-source Run:ai, making it available to all, as soon as the regulatory process is wrapped up. Not surprisingly, we haven’t heard complaints from customers, partners, or even competitors about our plan.”
- In October, the European Commission said that although the deal does not meet the notification thresholds set forth by the EU Merger Regulation, Italy expressed concern over the deal, via the Italian Competition Act.
- Nvidia announced its deal to acquire Run:ai in April in an effort to make AI chips more efficient by enabling multiple workloads to run in parallel, reducing the number of GPUs needed to complete tasks.