EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager warned of a “huge bottleneck” in Nvidia’s supply of artificial intelligence chips but said regulators were still deciding what measures, if any, to take.
“We’ve been asking them questions, but this is really preliminary,” she told Bloomberg during her trip to Singapore. So far, this “will not” be “in compliance with the requirements for regulatory action”.
Nvidia has attracted the attention of regulators since becoming the biggest beneficiary of the artificial intelligence spending boom. Its graphics processing units, or GPUs, are valued by data center operators for their ability to process the vast amounts of information needed to develop artificial intelligence models.
These chips have become one of the hottest commodities in the tech world, with cloud computing providers competing with each other to obtain them. Nvidia’s popular H100 processing unit is estimated to have helped it gain more than 80 percent market share, ahead of rivals Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
Despite supply constraints, Vestager said a secondary market for AI chip supplies could help spur innovation and level competition.
But she said dominant companies may face certain behavioral restrictions in the future.
“If you have this kind of dominance in the market, there are things you can’t do that smaller companies can do,” she said. “But other than that, as long as you do your thing and respect it, you’re good.”
